Library of the University of North Carolina From the Pendleton King Library Through Rush N. King, ’04 THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA ENDOWED BY THE DIALECTIC AND PHILANTHROPIC SOCIETIES PRU653 1887 UNIVERSITY OF N.C. AT CHAPEL HILL 00022558581 This book is due at the LOUIS R. WILSON LIBRARY on the last date stamped under “Date Due.” If not on hold it may be renewed by bringing it to the library. DATE DUE RET. DATE DUE RET. d Q-fj JUN 2 6 20 05 Form N, o. 513 ! Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2020 with funding from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill https://archive.org/details/miscellaneousess00elio_0 / GEORGE ELIOTS COMPLETE WORKS THE STERLING EDITION Miscellaneous Essays IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH THE VEIL LIFTED BROTHER JACOB / / / / If 4/ j / fa •«/ By GEORGE ELIOT sr BOSTON ESTES AND LAURIAT TABLE OF CONTENTS ESSAYS. Pagk Worldliness and Other-Worldliness : The Poet Young . . 9 (Westminster Review, 1857.) German Wit : Heinrich Heine.63 (Westminster Review, 1856.) Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming .105 (Westminster Review, 1855.) The Influence of Rationalism : Lecky’s History .... 139 (Fortnightly Review, 1865.) The Natural History of German Life: Riehl ..... 157 (Westminster Review, 1856.) Three Months in Weimar. 194 (Fraser’s Magazine, 1855.) Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt.214 (Blackwood’s Magazine, 1868.) LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK. Authorship. 233 Judgments on Authors .238 r _ Story-Telling. 240 Historic Imagination .243 Value in Originality .245 To the Prosaic all Things are Prosaic .245 TABLE OF CONTENTS. Page “ Dear Religious Love ”. 245 We make our own Precedents. 246 Birth oe Tolerance. 246 Felix qui non potuit. 247 Divine Grace a Real Emanation. 247 “A Fine Excess . 55 Feeling is Energy. 248 IMPRESSIONS OE THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. Looking Inward.253 Looking Backward.265 How WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH .279 A MAN SURPRISED AT HIS ORIGINALITY .293 A too Deferential Man.301 Only Temper.309 A Political Molecule.316 Tile Watch-Dog of Knowledge.320 A Half-Breed.327 Debasing the Moral Currency.334 The Wasp credited with the Honey-Comb.341 “ So Young ! 55 353 How WE COME TO GIVE OURSELVES FALSE TESTIMONIALS, AND BELIEVE IN THEM .359 The too Ready Writer.368 Diseases of Small Authorship.377 Moral Swindlers.386 Shadows of tile Coming Race.395 The Modern Hep ! Hep ! Hep !.401 The Lifted Veil Brother Jacob . 427 475 ILLUSTRATIONS. Portrait or Georg? Eliot. Frontispiece Original etching by E. A. Eowle. Portrait of Heine.. Original etching by Wm. Unger. Portrait of Heine. 104 Original etching by Wm. Unger. Portrait of Goethe. 196 Etched by S. A. Sciioff, from drawing by F. Lungren. PREFACE. W ISHES have often been expressed that the articles known to have been written by George Eliot in the Westminster Revieiv before she had become famous under that pseudonyme, should be republished. Those wishes are now gratified — as far, at any rate, as it is possible to gratify them. For it was not George Eliot’s desire that the whole of those articles should be rescued from oblivion. And in order that there might he no doubt on the subject, she made, some time before her death, a collection of such of her fugitive writings as she considered deserving of a per¬ manent form, carefully revised them for the press, and left them in the order in which they here appear, with written injunctions that no other pieces written by her, of date prior to 1857, should he republished. It will thus be seen that the present collection of Essays has the weight of her sanction, and has had, moreover, the advantage of such corrections and alterations as a revision long subsequent to the period of writing may have sug¬ gested to her. The opportunity afforded by this republication seemed a suitable one for giving to the world some “ notes,” as George Eliot simply called them, which belong to a much later period, and which have not been previously published. _ The exact date of their writing cannot be fixed with any J s) certainty, but it must have been some time between the’ r- l r* 11 PREFACE. appearance of “ Middlemarch ” and that of “ Theophrastus Such.” They were probably written without any distinct view to publication,— some of them for the satisfaction of her own mind; others perhaps as memoranda, and with an idea of working them out more fully at some later time. It may be of interest to know that, besides the “notes” here given, the note-book contains four which appeared in “Theophrastus Such,” three of them practically as they there stand; and it is not impossible that some of those in the present volume might also have been so utilized had they not happened to fall outside the general scope of the work. The marginal titles are George Eliot’s own, but for the general title, ‘‘Leaves from a Note-book,” I am responsible. I need only add that, in publishing these notes, I have the complete concurrence of my friend, Mr. Cross. Charles Lee Lewes. Higiigate, December , 1883. ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. WORLDLINESS AND OTILER-WORLDLINESS: THE POET YOUNG. T HE study of men, as they have appeared in different ages and under various social conditions, may be con¬ sidered as the natural history of the race. Let us, then, for a moment imagine ourselves as students of this natural his¬ tory, dredging the first half of the eighteenth century in search of specimens. About the year 1730 we have hauled up a remarkable individual of the species divine — a surpris¬ ing name, considering the nature of the animal before us, but we are used to unsuitable names in natural history. Let us examine this individual at our leisure. He is on the verge of fifty, and has recently undergone his metamorphosis into the clerical form. Lather a parodoxical specimen, if yon ob¬ serve him narrowly: a sort of cross between a sycophant and a psalmist; a poet whose imagination is alternately fired by the Last Hay and by a creation of peers, who fluctuates between rhapsodic applause of King George and rhapsodic applause of Jehovah. After spending “a foolish youth, the sport of peers and poets,” after being a hanger-on of the pro¬ fligate Duke of Wharton, after aiming in vain at a parliamen¬ tary career, and angling for pensions and preferment with fulsome dedications and fustian odes, he is a little disgusted with his imperfect success, and has determined to retire from the general mendicancy business to a particular branch ; in other words, he has determined on that renunciation of the world implied in u taking orders/ 7 with the prospect of a good living and an advantageous matrimonial connection. And no man can be better fitted for an Established Church. 10 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. He personifies completely her nice balance of temporalities and spiritualities. He is equally impressed with the momen¬ tousness of death and of burial fees ; he languishes at once for immortal life and for “ livings he has a fervid attach¬ ment to patrons in general, but on the whole prefers the Almighty. He will teach, with something more than official conviction, the nothingness of earthly things ; and he will feel something more than private disgust if his meritorious efforts in directing men’s attention to another world are not rewarded by substantial preferment in this. His secular man believes in cambric bands and silk stockings as charac¬ teristic attire for “ an ornament of religion and virtue,” hopes courtiers will never forget to copy Sir Robert Wal¬ pole, and writes begging-letters to the King’s mistress. His spiritual man recognizes no motives more familiar than Gol¬ gotha and u the skies; ” it walks in graveyards, or it soars among the stars. His religion exhausts itself in ejaculations and rebukes, and knows no medium between the ecstatic and the sententious. If it were not for the prospect of immortal¬ ity, he considers, it would be wise and agreeable to be inde¬ cent, or to murder one’s father; and, heaven apart, it would be extremely irrational in any man not to be a knave. Man, he thinks, is a compound of the angel and the brute : the brute is to be humbled by being reminded of its “ relation to the stalls,” and frightened into moderation by the contempla¬ tion of death-beds and skulls ; the angel is to be developed by vituperating this world and exalting the next; and by this double process you get the Christian, “the highest style of man.” With all this, our new-made divine is an un¬ mistakable poet. To a clay, compounded chiefly of the worldling and the rhetorician, there is added a real spark of Promethean fire. He will one day clothe his apostrophes and objurgations, his astronomical religion and his charnel-house morality, in lasting verse, which will stand, like a Juggernaut made of gold and jewels, at once magnificent and repulsive ; for this divine is Edward Young, the future author of the “Mght Thoughts.” WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 11 It would be extremely ill-bred in us to suppose that our readers are not acquainted with the facts of Young’s life $ they are amongst the things that “ every one knows ; ” but we have observed that, with regard to these universally known matters, the majority of readers like to be treated after the plan suggested by Monsieur Jourdain. When that distin¬ guished bourgeois was asked if he knew Latin, he replied, “Oui, mais faites comme si je ne le savais pas.” Assum¬ ing, then, as a polite writer should, that our readers know everything about Young, it will be a direct sequitur from that assumption that we should proceed as if they knew nothing, and recall the incidents of his biography with as much particularity as we may, without trenching on the space we shall need for our main purpose — the reconsidera¬ tion of his character as a moral and religious poet. Judging from Young’s works, one might imagine that the preacher had been organized in him by hereditary transmis¬ sion through a long line of clerical forefathers, that the diamonds of the “ Night Thoughts ” had been slowly con¬ densed from the charcoal of ancestral sermons. Yet it was not so. His grandfather, apparently, wrote himself gentle¬ man, not clerk ; and there is no evidence that preaching had run in the family blood before it took that turn in the per¬ son of the poet’s father, who was quadruply clerical, being at once rector, prebendary, Court chaplain, and dean. Young was born at his father’s rectory of Upham, in 1681. We may confidently assume that even the author of the “ Night Thoughts ” came into the world without a wig; but, apart from Dr. Doran’s authority, we should not have ventured to state that the excellent rector “ kissed, with dignified emo¬ tion , his only son and intended namesake.” Dr. Doran doubtless knows this, from his intimate acquaintance with clerical physiology and psychology. He has ascertained that the paternal emotions of prebendaries have a sacerdotal quality, and that the very chyme and chyle of a rector are conscious of the gown and band. In due time the boy went to Winchester College, and sub- 12 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. sequently, though not till he was twenty-two, to Oxford, where, for his father’s sake, he was befriended by the war¬ dens of two colleges, and in 1708, three years after his father’s death, nominated by Archbishop Tenison to a law- fellowship at All Souls. Of Young’s life at Oxford in these years, hardly anything is known. His biographer, Croft, has nothing to tell us but the vague report that, when “ Young found himself independent and his own master at All Souls, he w’as not the ornament to religion and morality that he after¬ wards became,” and the perhaps apocryphal anecdote, that Tindal, the atheist, confessed himself embarrassed by the originality of Young’s arguments. Both the report and the anecdote, however, are borne out by indirect evidence. As to the latter, Y r oung has left us sufficient proof that he was fond of arguing on the theological side, and that he had his own way of treating old subjects. As to the former, we learn that Pope, after saying other things which we know to be true of Young, added, that he passed “a foolish youth, the sport of peers and poets ; ” and, from all the indications we possess of his career till he was nearly fifty, we are in¬ clined to think that Pope’s statement only errs by defect, and that he should rather have said, “a foolish youth and middle age.” It is not likely that Young was a very hard student, for he impressed Johnson, who saw him in his old age, as “not a great scholar,” and as surprisingly ignorant of what Johnson thought “ quite common maxims ” in literature ; and there is no evidence that he filled either his leisure or his purse by taking pupils. His career as an author did not commence till he was nearly thirty, even dating from the publication of a portion of the “ Last Hay,” in the “ Tatler; ” so that he could hardly have been absorbed in composition. But where the fully developed insect is parasitic, we believe the larva is usually parasitic also, and we shall probably not be far wrong in supposing that l r oung at Oxford, as elsewhere, spent a good deal of his time in hanging about possible and actual patrons, and accommodating himself to their habits with con¬ siderable flexibility of conscience and of tongue ; being none WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 13 the less ready, upon occasion, to present himself as the cham¬ pion of theology, and to rhapsodize at convenient moments in the company of the skies or of skulls. That brilliant profli¬ gate, the Duke of Wharton, to whom Young afterwards clung as his chief patron, was at this time a mere boy; and, though it is probable that their intimacy had commenced, since the Duke’s father and mother were friends of the old Dean, that intimacy ought not to aggravate any unfavorable inference as to Young’s Oxford life. It is less likely that he fell into any exceptional vice, than that he differed from the men around him chiefly in his episodes of theological advocacy and rhap¬ sodic solemnity. He probably sowed his wild oats after the coarse fashion of his times, for he has left us sufficient evi¬ dence that his moral sense was not delicate ; but his compan¬ ions, who were occupied in sowing their own oats, perhaps took it as a matter of course that he should be a rake, and were only struck with the exceptional circumstance that he was a pious and moralizing rake. There is some irony in the fact that the two first poetical productions of Young, published in the same year, were his “ Epistle to Lord Lansdowne,” celebrating the recent creation of peers, — Lord Lansdowne’s creation in particular, — and the “Last Day.” Other poets, besides Young, found the device for obtaining a Tory majority—by turning twelve insignificant commoners into insignificant lords —an irresistible stimulus to verse; but no other poet showed so versatile an enthu¬ siasm, so nearly equal an ardor for the honor of the new baron and the honor of the Deity. But the twofold nature of the sycophant and the psalmist is not more strikingly shown in the contrasted themes of the two poems, than in the transitions from bombast about monarchs to bombast about the resurrection, in the “ Last Day ” itself. The dedi¬ cation of the poem to Queen Anne, Young afterwards sup¬ pressed, for he was always ashamed of having flattered a dead patron. In this dedication, Croft tells us, “ he gives her Majesty praise indeed for her victories, but says that the author is more pleased to see her rise from this lower world, 14 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. soaring above the clouds, passing the first and second heavens, and leaving the fixed stars behind her ; nor will he lose her there, he says, but keep her still in view through the bound¬ less spaces on the other side of creation, in her journey towards eternal bliss, till he behold the heaven of heavens open, and angels receiving and conveying her still onward from the stretch of his imagination, which tires in her pur¬ suit, and falls back again to earth.” The self-criticism which prompted the suppression of the dedication, did not, however, lead him to improve either the rhyme or the reason of the unfortunate couplet — “ When other Bourbons reign in other lands, And, if men’s sins forbid not, other Annes.” In the “ Epistle to Lord Lansdowne,” Young indicates his taste for the drama; and there is evidence that his tragedy of u Busiris ” was “ in the theatre ” as early as this very year, 1713, though it was not brought on the stage till nearly six years later; so that l r oung was now very decidedly bent on authorship, for which his degree of B. C. L., taken in this year, was doubtless a magical equipment. Another poem, The Force of Religion; or, Vanquished Love,” founded on the execution of Lady Jane Grey and her husband, quickly followed, showing fertility in feeble and tasteless verse ; and on the Queen’s death, in 1714, Young lost no time in making a poetical lament for a departed patron a vehicle for ex¬ travagant laudation of the new monarch. No further literary production of his appeared until 1716, when a Latin oration, which he delivered on the foundation of the Codrington Library at All Souls, gave him a new opportunity for dis¬ playing his alacrity in inflated panegyric. In 1717 it is probable that Young accompanied the Duke of Wharton to Ireland, though so slender are the materials for his biography, that the chief basis for this supposition is a passage in his “ Conjectures on Original Composition,” written when he was nearly eighty, in which he intimates that he had once been in that country. But there are many WORLDLINESS AND OTIIER-WORLDLINESS. 15 facts surviving to indicate that for the next eight or nine years, Young was a sort of attache of Wharton’s. In 1719, according to legal records, the Duke granted him an annuity, in consideration of his having relinquished the office of tutor to Lord Burleigh, with a life annuity of £100 a year, on his Grace’s assurances that he would provide for him in a much more ample manner. And again, from the same evidence, it appears that in 1721 Young received from Wharton a bond for £600, in compensation of expenses incurred in standing for Parliament at the Duke’s desire, and as an earnest of greater services which his Grace had promised him on his refraining from the spiritual and temporal advantages of taking orders, with a certainty of two livings in the gift of his college. It is clear, therefore, that lay advancement, as long as there was any chance of it, had more attractions for Young than clerical preferment ; and that at this time he accepted the Duke of Wharton as the pilot of his career. A more creditable relation of Young’s was his friendship with Tickell, with whom he was in the habit of interchanging criticisms, and to whom in 1719 — the same year, let us note, in which he took his doctor’s degree — he addressed his “ Lines on the Death of Addison.” Close upon these followed his “ Paraphrase of part of the Book of Job,” with a dedica¬ tion to Parker, recently made Lord Chancellor, showing that the possession of Wharton’s patronage did not prevent Young from fishing in other waters. He knew nothing of Parker, but that did not prevent him from magnifying the new Chancellor’s merits; on the other hand, he did know Whar¬ ton, but this again did not prevent him from prefixing to his tragedy, “ The Revenge,” which appeared in 1721, a dedication attributing to the Duke all virtues as well as all accomplish¬ ments. In the concluding sentence of this dedication Young naively indicates that a considerable ingredient in his grati¬ tude was a lively sense of anticipated favors. “My present fortune is his bounty, and my future his care, — which I will venture to say will always be remembered to his honor ; since he, I know, intended his generosity as an encouragement to 16 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. merit, though, through his very pardonable partiality to one who bears him so sincere a duty and respect, I happen to receive the benefit of it.” Young was economical with his ideas and images ; he was rarely satisfied with using a clever thing once, and this bit of ingenious humility was afterwards made to do duty in the “ Instalment,” a poem addressed to Walpole : — “ Be this thy partial smile, from censure free; ’T was meant for merit, though it fell on me.” It was probably “ The Revenge,” that Young was writing when, as we learn from Spence’s anecdotes, the Duke of Wharton gave him a skull with a candle fixed in it, as the most appropriate lamp by which to write tragedy. Accord¬ ing to Young’s dedication, the Duke was “accessary” to the scenes of this tragedy in a more important way, “ not only by suggesting the most beautiful incident in them, but by making all possible provision for the success of the whole.” A statement which is credible, not indeed on the ground of Young’s dedicatory assertion, but from the known ability of the Duke, who, as Pope tells us, possessed “ each gift of Nature and of Art, And wanted nothing but an honest heart.” The year 1722 seems to have been the period of a visit to Mr. Dodington, of Eastbury, in Dorsetshire, —• the “ pure Dor- setian downs,” celebrated by Thomson, — in which Young made the acquaintance of Voltaire; for in the subsequent dedication of his “Sea Piece” to “Mr. Voltaire,” he recalls their meeting on “ Dorset Downs; ” and it was in this year that Christopher Pitt, a gentleman-poet of those days, ad¬ dressed an “Epistle to Dr. Edward Young, at Eastbury, in Dorsetshire,” which has at least the merit of this biographi¬ cal couplet—• “ While with your Dodington retired you sit, Charmed with his flowing Burgundy and wit.” Dodington, apparently, was charmed in his turn, for he told Dr. Wharton that Young was “ far superior to the French WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 17 poet in the variety and novelty of his bon-mots and repartees.” Unfortunately, the only specimen of Young’s wit on this occasion, that has been preserved to us, is the epigram repre¬ sented as an extempore retort (spoken aside, surely) to Voltaire’s criticism of Milton’s episode of sin and death: — “ Thou art so witty, profligate, and thin, At once we think thee Milton, Death, and Sin; ” an epigram which, in the absence of “ flowing Burgundy/' does not strike us as remarkably brilliant. Let us give Young the benefit of the doubt thrown on the genuineness of this epigram by his own poetical dedication, in which he repre¬ sents himself as having “ soothed ” Voltaire’s “ rage ” against Milton “ with gentle rhymes ; ” though in other respects that dedication is anything but favorable to a high estimate of Young’s wit. Other evidence apart, we should not be eager for the after-dinner conversation of the man who wrote, — “Thine is the Drama, how renowned ! Thine Epic’s loftier trump to sound ; But let Avion s sea-strung harp he mine : But where ’s his dolphin ? Know’st thou where ? May that be found in thee , Voltaire ! ” The “ Satires” appeared in 1725 and 1726, each, of course, with its laudatory dedication and its compliments insinuated amongst the rhymes. The seventh and last is dedicated to Sir Robert Walpole, is very short, and contains nothing in particular except lunatic flattery of George the First and his prime minister, attributing that royal hog’s late escape from a storm at sea to the miraculous influence of his grand and virtuous soul; for George, he says, rivals the angels : — “ George, who in foes can soft affections raise, And charm envenomed satire into praise. Nor human rage alone his power perceives, But the mad winds and the tumultuous waves, E’en storms (Death’s fiercest ministers ! ) forbear, And in their own wild empire learn to spare. Thus, Nature’s self, supporting Man’s decree, Styles Britain’s sovereign, sovereign of the sea.” A VOL. IX. 18 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. As for Walpole, what he felt at this tremendous crisis — “ No powers of language, but his own, can tell; His own, which Nature and the Graces form, At will to raise, or hush, the civil storm.” It is a coincidence worth noticing, that this Seventh Satire was published in 1726, and that the warrant of George the First, granting Young a pension of £200 a year from Lady-day, 1725, is dated May 3, 1726. The gratitude ex¬ hibited in this Satire may have been chiefly prospective, but the “ Instalment,” a poem inspired by the thrilling event of Walpole’s installation as Knight of the Garter, was clearly written with*the double ardor of a man who has got a pension, and hopes for something more. His emotion about Walpole is precisely at the same pitch as his subsequent emotion about the Second Advent. In the “ Instalment ” he says, — “ With invocations some their hearts inflame ; 1 need no muse , a Walpole is my theme” And of God coming to Judgment, he says, in the “Night Thoughts: ” — “ I find my inspiration is my theme; The grandeur of my subject, is my muse.” Nothing can be feebler than this “ Instalment,” except in the strength of impudence with which the writer professes to scorn the prostitution of fair fame, the “ profanation of celestial fire.” Herbert Croft tells us that Young made more than three thousand pounds by his “ Satires,” — a surprising statement, taken in connection with the reasonable doubt he throws on the story related in Spence’s “ Anecdotes,” that the Duke of Wharton gave Young £2,000 for this work. Young, however, seems to have been tolerably fortunate in the pecuniary re¬ sults of his publications; and with his literary profits, his annuity from Wharton, his fellowship, and his pension, not to mention other bounties which may be inferred from the high merits he discovers in many men of wealth and position, WORLDLINESS AND OTIIER-WORLDLINESS. 19 we may fairly suppose that he now laid the foundation of the considerable fortune he left at his death. It is probable that the Duke of Wharton’s final departure for the Continent and disgrace at Court in 1726, and the consequent cessation of Young’s reliance on his patronage, tended not only to heighten the temperature of his poetical enthusiasm for Sir Robert Walpole, but also to turn his thoughts towards the Church again, as the second-best means of rising in the world. On the accession of George the Sec¬ ond, Young found the same transcendent merits in him as in his predecessor, and celebrated them in a style of poetry pre¬ viously unattempted by him — the Pindaric ode, a poetic form which helped him to surpass himself in furious bom¬ bast. “Ocean, an Ode: concluding with a Wish,” was the title of this piece. He afterwards pruned it, and cut off, amongst other things, the concluding Wish, expressing the yearning for humble retirement which, of course, had prompted him to the effusion ; but we may judge of the rejected stanzas by the quality of those he has allowed to remain. For exam¬ ple, calling on Britain’s dead mariners to rise and meet their “ country’s full-blown glory,” in the person of the new King, he says: — “ What powerful charm Can Death disarm 7 Your long, your iron slumbers break 1 ? By Jove, by Fame, By George’s name, Awake ! awake ! awake! awake ! ” Soon after this notable production, which was written with the ripe folly of forty-seven, Young took orders, and was presently appointed chaplain to the King. “ The Brothers,” his third and last tragedy, which was already in rehearsal, he now withdrew from the stage, and sought reputation in a way more accordant with the decorum of his new profession, by turning prose writer. But after publishing “A True Esti-. mate of Human Life,” with a dedication to the Queen, as one of the t( most shining representatives ” of God on earth, and 20 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. a sermon, entitled “ An Apology for Princes; or, the Rever¬ ence due to Government,” preached before the House of Com¬ mons, his Pindaric ambition again seized him, and he matched his former ode by another, called “ Imperium Pelagi; a Naval Lyric; written in imitation of Pindar’s spirit, occasioned by his Majesty’s return from Hanover, 1729, and the succeeding Peace.” Since he afterwards suppressed this second ode, we must suppose that it was rather worse than the first. Next came his two “ Epistles to Pope, concerning the Authors of the Age,” remarkable for nothing but the audacity of affecta¬ tion with which the most servile of poets professes to despise servility. In. 1730 Young was presented by his college with the rec¬ tory of Welwyn, in Hertfordshire, and, in the following year, when he was just fifty, he married Lady Elizabeth Lee, a widow with two children, who seems to have been in favor with Queen Caroline, and who probably had an income — two attractions which doubtless enhanced the power of her other charms. Pastoral duties and domesticity probably cured Young of some bad habits ; but, unhappily, they did not cure him either of flattery or of fustian. Three more odes followed, quite as bad as those of his bachelorhood, ex¬ cept that in the third he announced the wise resolution of never writing another. It must have been about this time, since Young was now “ turned of fifty,” that he wrote the letter to Mrs. Howard (afterwards Lady Suffolk), George the Second’s mistress, which proves that he used other engines, besides Pindaric ones, in “ besieging Court favor.” The let¬ ter is too characteristic to be omitted : — Monday Morning. Madam, — I know his majesty’s goodness to his servants, and his love of justice in general, so well, that I am confident, if His Majesty knew my case, I should not have any cause to despair of his gracious favor to me. Abilities. Good Manners. Service. Age. Want. Sufferings and Zeal for his majesty. WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS 21 These, madam, are the proper points of consideration in the person that humbly hopes his majesty’s favor. As to Abilities , all I can presume to say is, I have done the best I could to improve them. As to Good manners , I desire no favor, if any just objection lies against them. As for Service, I have been near seven years in his majesty’s, and never omitted any duty in it, which few can say. As for Age , I am turned of fifty. As for Want, I have no manner of preferment. As for Sufferings , I have lost £300 per ann. by being in his majesty’s service; as I have shown in a Representation which his majesty has been so good as to read and consider. As for Zeal, I have written nothing without showing my duty to their majesties, and some pieces are dedicated to them. This, madam, is the short and true state of my case. They that make their court to the ministers, and not their majesties, succeed bet¬ ter. If my case deserves some consideration, and you can serve me in it, I humbly hope and believe you will: I shall, therefore, trouble you no farther; but beg leave to subscribe myself, with truest respect and gratitude, Yours, &c., Edward Young. P. S. I have some hope that my Lord Townshend is my friend; if therefore soon, and before he leaves the court, you had an oppor¬ tunity of mentioning me, with that favor you have been so good to show, I think it would not fail of success; and, if not, I shall owe you more than any. (Suffolk Letters, vol. i. p. 285.) Young’s wife died in 1741, leaving him one son, born in 1733. That he had attached himself strongly to her two daughters by her former marriage, there is better evidence in the report, mentioned by Mrs. Montagu, of his practical kind¬ ness-and liberality to the younger, than in his lamentations over the elder as the Narcissa of the “Night Thoughts.” Narcissa had died in 1735, shortly after marriage to Mr. Temple, the son of Lord Palmerston ; and Mr. Temple him¬ self, after a second marriage, died in 1740, a year before Lady Elizabeth Young. These, then, are the three deaths supposed 22 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. to have inspired “ The Complaint/’ which forms the three first books of the “ Night Thoughts : ” — “ Insatiate archer, could not one suffice 7 | Thy shaft flew thrice : and thrice my peace was slain; And thrice, ere thrice yon moon had filled her horn.” Since we find Young departing from the truth of dates, in order to heighten the effect of his calamity, or at least of his climax, we need not be surprised that he allowed his imagi¬ nation great freedom in other matters besides chronology, and that the character of Philander can, by no process, be made to fit Mr. Temple. The supposition that the much- lectured Lorenzo, of the “ Night Thoughts,” was Young’s own son, is hardly rendered more absurd by the fact that the poem was written when that son was a boy, than by the obvi¬ ous artificiality of the characters Young introduces as targets for his arguments and rebukes. Among all the trivial efforts of conjectured criticism, there can hardly be one more futile than the attempt to discover the original of those pitiable lay-figures, the Lorenzos and Altamonts of Young’s didac¬ tic prose and poetry. His muse never stood face to face with a genuine, living human being; she would have been as much startled by such an encounter as a necromancer whose incantations and blue fire had actually conjured up a demon. The “Night Thoughts” appeared between 1741 and 1745. Although he declares in them that he has chosen God for his “ patron” henceforth, this is not at all to the prejudice of some half-dozen lords, duchesses, and right honorables, who have the privilege of sharing finely turned compliments with their co-patron. The line which closed the Second Night in the earlier editions — “ Wits spare not Heaven, O Wilmington ! — nor thee ” — is an intense specimen of that perilous juxtaposition of ideas by which Young, in his incessant search after point and novelty, unconsciously converts his compliments into sar¬ casms ; and his apostrophe to the moon, as more likely to be favorable to his song if he calls her “ fair Portland of the WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 23 skies/’ is worthy even of his Pindaric ravings. His ostenta¬ tions renunciation of worldly schemes, and especially of his twenty years’ siege of Court favor, are in the tone of one who retains some hope, in the midst of his querulousness. He descended from the astronomical rhapsodies of his Ninth Night, published in 1745, to more terrestrial strains, in his “ Reflections on the Public Situation of the Kingdom,” dedicated to the Duke of Newcastle; but in this critical year we get a glimpse of him through a more prosaic and less re¬ fracting medium. He spent a part of the year at Tunbridge Wells j and Mrs. Montagu, who was there too, gives a very lively picture of the “ divine doctor,” in her letters to the Duchess of Portland, on whom Young had bestowed the su- perlative bombast to which we have recently alluded. We shall borrow the quotations from Dr. Doran, in spite of their length, because, to our mind, they present the most agreeable portrait we possess of Young:— U I have great joy in Dr. Young, whom I disturbed in a reverie. At first he started, then bowed, then fell hack into a surprise ) then began a speech, relapsed into his astonishment two or three times, forgot what he had been saying; began a new subject, and so went on. I told him your grace desired he would write longer letters ; to which he cried 1 Ha ! ’ most emphatically, and I leave you to interpret what it meant. He has made a friendship with one person here, whom I believe you would not imagine to have been made for his bosom friend. You would, perhaps, suppose it was a bishop or dean, a prebend, a pious preacher, a clergyman of exemplary life, or, if a layman, of most virtuous conversation, one that had paraphrased St. Matthew, or wrote comments on St. Paul. . . . You would not guess that this asso¬ ciate of the doctor’s was — old Cibber ! Certainly in their religious, moral, and civil character, there is no relation; but in their dramatic capacity there is some.” — [Mrs. Montagu was not aware that Cibber, whom Young had named not disparagingly in his Satires, was the brother of his old schoolfellow ; but to return to our hero.] “ The waters,” says Mrs. Montagu, u have raised his spirits to a fine pitch, as your grace will imagine, when I tell you how sublime an answer he made to a very vulgar question. I asked him how long he stayed’ at the Wells : he said, i As long as my rival stayed ; — as long as the sun 24 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. did.’ Among the visitors at the Wells were Lady Sunderland (wife of Sir Robert Sutton) and her sister, Mrs. Tichborne. He did an admirable thing to Lady Sunderland: on her mentioning Sir Robert Sutton, he asked her where Sir Robert’s lady was ; on which we all laughed very heartily, and I brought him off, half ashamed, to my lodgings, where, during breakfast, he assured me he had asked after Lady Sunderland, because he had a great honor for her; and that, having a respect for her sister, he designed to have inquired after her, if we had not put it out of his head by laughing at him. You must know Mrs. Tichborne sat next to Lady Sunderland. It would have been admirable to have had him finish his compliment in that man¬ ner. . . . His expressions all bear the stamp of novelty, and his thoughts of sterling sense. He practises a kind of philosophical ab¬ stinence. . . . He carried Mrs. Rolt and myself to Tunbridge, five miles from hence, where we were to see some fine old ruins. . . . First rode the doctor on a tall steed, decently caparisoned in dark gray; next, ambled Mrs. Rolt on a hackney horse ; . . . then fol¬ lowed your humble servant on a milk-white palfrey. I rode on in safety, and at leisure to observe the company, especially the two figures that brought up the rear. The first was my servant, valiantly armed with two uncharged pistols; the last was the doctor’s man, whose uncombed hair so resembled the mane of the horse he rode, one could not help imagining they were of kin, and wishing, for the honor of the family, that they had had one comb betwixt them. On his head was a velvet cap, much resembling a black saucepan, and on his side hung a little basket. At last we arrived at the King’s Head, where the loyalty of the doctor induced him to alight ; and then, knight-errant-like, he took his damsels from off their palfreys, and courteously handed us into the inn. . . . The party returned to the Wells; and ‘the silver Cynthia held up her lamp in the heavens’ the while. The night silenced all but our divine doctor, who some¬ times uttered things fit to be spoken in a season when all nature seems to be hushed and hearkening. I followed, gathering wisdom as I went, till I found, by my horse’s stumbling, that I was in a bad road, and that the blind was leading the blind. So I placed my servant between the doctor and myself; which he not perceiving, went on in a most philosophical strain, to the great admiration of my poor clown of a servant, who, not being wrought up to any pitch of enthusiasm, nor making any answer to all the fine things he heard, the doctor, won¬ dering I was dumb, and grieving I was so stupid, looked round and declared his surprise.” WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 25 \ oung s oddity and absence of mind are gathered from other sources besides these stories of Mrs. Montagu’s, and gave rise to the report that he was the original of Fielding’s “ Parson Adams; ” but this Croft denies, and mentions another Young, who really sat for the portrait, and who, we imagine, had both more Greek and more genuine simplicity than the poet. His love of chatting with Colley Cibber was an in¬ dication that the old predilection for the stage survived, in spite of his emphatic contempt for “all joys but joys that never can expire; ” and the production of “ The Brothers,” at Drury Lane in 1753, after a suppression of fifteen years, was perhaps not entirely due to the expressed desire to give the proceeds to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. The author’s profits were not more than £400, — in those days a disappointing sum; and Young, as we learn from his friend Richardson, did not make this the limit of his dona¬ tion, but gave a thousand guineas to the Society. “ I had some talk with him,” says Richardson in one of his letters, “ about this great action. ( I always,’ said he, ‘ intended to do something handsome for the Society. Had I deferred it to my demise, I should have given away my son’s money. All the world are inclined to pleasure; could I have given myself a greater by disposing of the sum to a different use, I should have done it.’ ” Surely he took his old friend Rich¬ ardson for Lorenzo ! His next work was “ The Centaur not Fabulous; in Six Letters to a Friend, on the Life in Vogue,” which reads very much like the most objurgatory parts of the “Night Thoughts ” reduced to prose. It is preceded by a preface which, though addressed to a lady, is, in its denunciations of vice, as grossly indecent and almost as flippant as the epi¬ logues written by “friends,” which he allowed to be reprinted after his tragedies in the latest edition of his works. We like much better than “The Centaur,” “Conjectures on Origi¬ nal Composition,” written in 1759, for the sake, he says, of communicating to the world the well-known anecdote about Addison’s death-bed, and, with the exception of his poem on Resignation, the last thing he ever published. 26 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. The estrangement from his son which must have embittered the later years of his life, appears to have begun not many years after the mother’s death. On the marriage of her second daughter, who had previously presided over Young’s household, a Mrs. Hallows, understood to be a woman of dis¬ creet age, and the daughter (or widow) of a clergyman who was an old friend of Young’s, became housekeeper at Welwyn. Opinions about ladies are apt to differ. “Mrs. Hallows was a woman of piety, improved by reading,” says one witness, “She was a verv coarse woman,” savs Hr. Johnson; and we shall presently find some indirect evidence that her temper was perhaps not quite so much improved as her piety. Ser¬ vants, it seems, were not fond of remaining long in the house with her; a satirical curate, named Kidgell, hints at “ drops of juniper” taken as a cordial (but perhaps he was spiteful, and a teetotaler); and Young’s son is said to have told his father that “an old man should not resign himself to the management of anybody.” The result was, that the son was banished from home for the rest of his father’s lifetime, though Young seems never to have thought of disinheriting him. Our latest glimpses of the aged poet are derived from certain letters of Mr. Jones, his curate, — letters preserved in the British Museum, and happily made accessible to common mortals in Nichols’s “Anecdotes.” Mr. Jones was a man of some literary activity and ambition, —a collector of interest¬ ing documents, and one of those concerned in the “ Free and Candid Disquisitions,” the design of which was “to point out such things in our ecclesiastical establishment as want to be reviewed and amended.” On these and kindred subjects he corresponded with Dr. Birch, occasionally troubling him with queries and manuscripts. We have a respect for Mr. Jones. Unlike any person who ever troubled us with queries or manuscripts, he mitigates the infliction by such gifts as “ a fat pullet,” wishing he “ had anything better to send; but this depauperizing vicarage [of Alconbury] too often checks the freedom and forwardness of my mind.” Another day WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 27 comes a “ pound canister of tea j ” another, a “ young fatted goose.” Clearly, Mr. Jones was entirely unlike your literary correspondents of the present day ; he forwarded manuscripts, but he had “ bowels,” and forwarded poultry too. His first letter from Welwyn is dated June, 1759, not quite six years before Young’s death. In June, 17G2, he expresses a wish to go to London “ this summer. But,” he continues, — u My time and pains are almost continually taken up here, and . . . I have been, I now find, a considerable loser, upon the whole, by con¬ tinuing here so long. The consideration of this, and the inconven¬ iences I sustained, and do still experience, from my late illness, obliged me at last to acquaint the Doctor [Young] with my case, and to assure him that I plainly perceived the duty and confinement here to be too much for me; for which reason I must, I said, beg to be at liberty to resign my charge at Michaelmas. I began to give him these notices in February, when I was very ill; and now I perceive, by what he told me the other day, that he is in some difficulty : for which reason he is at last, he says, resolved to advertise, and even, which is much wondered at, to raise the salary considerably higher. (What he allowed my predecessors was £20 per annum ; and now he proposes £50, as he tells me.) I never asked him to raise it for me, though I well knew it was not equal to the duty ; nor did I say a word about myself when he lately suggested to me his intentions upon this subject.” In a postscript to this letter, he says: — u I may mention to you farther, as a friend that may be trusted, that, in all likelihood, the poor old gentleman will not find it a very easy matter, unless by dint of money, and force upon himself, to pro¬ cure a man that he can like for his next curate, nor one that ivill stay with him so long as I have done. Then, his great age will recur to people’s thoughts; and if he has any foibles, either in temper or con¬ duct, they will be sure not to be forgotten on this occasion by those who know him j and those who do not, will probably be on their guard. On these and the like considerations, it is by no means an eligible office to be seeking out for a curate for him, as he has several times wished me to do ; and would, if he knew that I am now writing to you, wish your assistance also. But my best friends here, who well foresee the probable consequences, and wish me well, earnestly dissuade 28 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. me from complying : and I will decline the office with as much decency as I can: but high salary will, I suppose, fetch in somebody or other, soon.” 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 it 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 irre¬ movable obstruction to his happiness within hisivalls, 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 ivitli 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) is talked of; whereof this vill and neighborhood is full. Some disbelieve; others say, ‘ Jt is no wonder , where about eighteen or more servants are sometimes taken and dismissed in the course of a year.' 1 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.” WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-W ORLDLINESS. 29 No other mention of Young’s affairs occurs until April 2, 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 opin¬ ion, 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 can¬ not as yet be certain; all I shall say is, it seems not improbable . . . I heartily wish the ancient man’s heart may prove tender towards his son ; though, knowing him so well, I can scarce hope to hear such desirable news” Eleven days later he writes : — 11 1 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 char¬ acter 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 death-bed, 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 for¬ giveness, 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, 1 1 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 in¬ formed that he was pleased to make respectful inentiou of me in his will, — expressing his satisfaction in my care of his parish, bequeath¬ ing to me a handsome legacy , and appointing me to be one of his executors.” 80 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 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, spontane¬ ous, and confidential hints. To Mrs. Hallows, Young left a legacy of £1,000, 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 Seeker, 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 neigh- WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 31 bor for upwards 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 there¬ fore the rather believe them when they give each other any extra-official praise. Bishop liildesley, then writing of 1 oung to Richardson, says : — The impeltinence of my frequent visits to him was amply re¬ warded., foiasmuch as, I can truly say, he never received me hut 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 contradictipn, 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 occur¬ rences 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 quali¬ ties 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 evi¬ dence, the outline of Young’s character is too distinctly trace¬ able 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 32 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. no poet seems less easy and spontaneous than YYung, 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 pleas¬ ure 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 pre¬ cisely 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 a mind in which the higher human sympathies were inactive. This judgment is en¬ tirely 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 gen¬ ius 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 WORLDLINESS AND OTIIER-WORLDLINESS. 83 “common sense” in which Young was conspicuously defi¬ cient ; and it was partly owing to this deficiency that his genius, waiting to be determined by the highest prize, flut¬ tered 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 mani¬ fest. 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 towards antithetic apothegm and rhapsodic climax. The passages that arrest us in his trage¬ dies 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: ’T is to be born to Plato and to Cassar; ’T is to be great forever; ’T is pleasure, ’t is ambition, then, to die.” His prose writings all read like the u Night Thoughts,” either diluted into prose, or not yet crystallized into poetry.- For example, in his “ Thoughts for Age,” he says, — VOL. IX. 3 84 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. “ 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 en¬ larges his wings to our imagination ; and our fear of death, his scythe; as Time himself grows less. His consumption is deep; his annihila¬ tion is at hand. 77 This is a dilution of the magnificent image : — “ Time in advance behind him hides his wings, And seems to creep decrepit with his age. Behold him when past by ! What then is seen But his proud pinions, swifter than the winds 1 ” Again: — “A requesting Omnipotence 1 ? What can stun and confound thy reason more ? What more can ravish and exalt thy heart ? It cannot but ravish and exalt; it cannot but gloriously disturb and perplex thee, to take in all that thought suggests. Thou child of the dust! Thou speck of misery and sin ! How abject thy weakness, how great is thy power ! Thou crawler on earth, and possible (I was about to say) controller of the skies ! Weigh, and weigh well, the wondrous truths I have in view: which cannot be weighed too much ; which the more they are weighed, amaze the more ; which to have supposed, before they were revealed, would have been as great madness, and to have pre¬ sumed on as great sin, as it is now madness and sin not to believe. 77 Even in his Pindaric odes, in which he made the most vio¬ lent efforts against nature, he is still neither more nor less than the Young of the “Last Pay,” emptied and swept of his genius, and possessed by seven demons of fustian and bad rhyme. Even here, his “ Ercles’ Vein 77 alternates with his moral platitudes, and we have the perpetual text of the “ Night Thoughts : ” — “ Gold, pleasure buys; But pleasure dies, For soon the gross fruition cloys ; Though raptures court, The sense is short; But virtue kindles living joys, — WORLDLINESS AND OTIIER-WORLDLINESS. 85 “ Joys felt alone ! Joys asked of none! Which Time’s and Fortune’s arrows miss : Joys that subsist, Though fates resist, An unprecarious, endless bliss ! “ Unhappy they ! And falsely gay! Who bask forever in success; A constant feast Quite palls the taste, And long enjoyment is distress.” In the u Last Day,” again, which is the earliest thing he wrote, we have an anticipation of all his greatest faults and merits. Conspicuous among the faults is that attempt to ex¬ alt our conceptions of Deity by vulgar images and compari¬ sons, which is so offensive in the later “ Night Thoughts.” In a burst of prayer and homage to God, called forth by the contemplation of Christ coming to Judgment, he asks, “ Who brings the change of the seasons ? ” and answers, — “ Not the great Ottoman, or Greater Czar; Not Europe’s arbitress of peace and war! ” Conceive the soul in its most solemn moments, assuring God that it does n’t place his power below that of Louis Napoleon or Queen Victoria ! But in the midst of uneasy rhymes, inappropriate imagery, vaulting sublimity that o’erleaps itself, and vulgar emotions, we have in this poem an occasional flash of genius, a touch of simple grandeur, which promises as much as Young ever achieved. Describing the on-coming of the dissolution of all things, he says, — ' “ No sun in radiant glory shines on high ; No light hut from the terrors of the sky” And again, speaking of great armies, — “ Whose rear lay wrapt in night, while breaking dawn Roused the broad front, and called the battle on.” 36 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. And this wail of the lost souls is fine : — “ And this for sin ? Could I offend if I had never been ? But still increased the senseless, happy mass. Flowed in the stream, or shivered in the grass ? Father of mercies! Why from silent earth Didst thou awake and curse me into birth % Tear me from quiet, ravish me from night, And make a thankless present of thy light ? Push into being a reverse of thee, And animate a clod with misery ? ” But it is seldom in l^oung’s rhymed poems that the effect of a felicitous thought or image is not counteracted by our sense of the constraint he suffered from the necessities of rhyme, — that “ Gothic demon,” as he afterwards called it, “ which modern poetry tasting, became mortal.” In relation to his own power, no one will question the truth of his dic¬ tum, that u blank verse is verse unfallen, uncurst; verse re¬ claimed, reinthroned in the true language of the gods; who never thundered nor suffered their Homer to thunder in rhyme.” His want of mastery in rhyme is especially a drawback on the effects of his Satires; for epigrams and witticisms are peculiarly susceptible to the intrusion of a superfluous word, or to an inversion which implies con¬ straint. Here, even more than elsewhere, the art that con¬ ceals art is an absolute requisite, and to have a witticism presented to us in limping or cumbrous rhythm is as coun¬ teractive to any electrifying effect, as to see the tentative grimaces by which a comedian prepares a grotesque counte¬ nance. We discern the process, instead of being startled by the result. This is one reason why the Satires, read seriatim , have a flatness to us, which, when we afterwards read picked pas¬ sages, we are inclined to disbelieve in, and to attribute to some deficiency in our own mood. But there are deeper rea¬ sons for that dissatisfaction. Young is not a satirist of a high order. His satire has neither the terrible vigor, the lacerating energy, of genuine indignation, nor the humor WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 37 which owns loving fellowship with the poor human nature it laughs at; nor yet the personal bitterness which, as in Pope’s characters of Sporus and Atticus, ensures those living touches by virtue of which the individual and particular in Art be¬ comes the universal and immortal. Young could never describe a real, complex human being ; but what he could do, with eminent success, was to describe, with neat and finished point, obvious types of manners rather than of character, — to write cold and clever epigrams on personified vices and absurdities. There is no more emotion in his satire than if he were turning witty verses on a waxen image of Cupid, or a lady’s glove. He has none of those felicitous epithets, none of those pregnant lines, by which Pope’s Satires have enriched the ordinary speech of educated men. Young’s wit will be found in almost every instance to consist in that antithetic combination of ideas which, of all the forms of wit, is most within reach of clever effort. In his gravest arguments, as well as in his lightest satire, one might imagine that he had set himself to work out the problem, how much antithesis might be got out of a given subject. And there he com¬ pletely succeeds. His neatest portraits are all wrought on this plan. Narcissus, for example, who “ Omits no duty ; nor can Envy say He missed, these many years, the Church or Play: He makes no noise in Parliament, ’t is true; But pays his debts, and visit when’t is due ; His character and gloves are ever clean, And then he can out-bow the bowing Dean; A smile eternal on his lip he wears, Which equally the wise and worthless shares. In gay fatigues, this most undaunted chief, Patient of idleness beyond belief, Most charitably lends the town his face For ornament in every public place; As sure as cards he to th’ assembly comes, And is the furniture of drawing-rooms: When Ombre calls, his hand and heart are free, And, joined to two, he fails not —to make three ; Narcissus is the glory of his race; 38 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. For who does nothing with a better grace q To deck my list by nature were designed Such shining expletives of human kind, Who want, while through blank life they dream along, Sense to be right and passion to be wrong.’' It is but seldom that we find a touch of that easy slyness which gives an additional zest to surprise ; but here is an instance: —- “ See Tityrus, with merriment possest, Is burst with laughter ere he hears the jest ; What need he stay, for when the joke is o’er, His teeth will be no whiter than before.” Like Pope, whom he imitated, he sets out with a psycho¬ logical mistake as the basis of his satire, attributing all forms of folly to one passion,—the love of fame, or vanity, — a much grosser mistake, indeed, than Pope’s exaggeration of the extent to which the “ruling passion” determines con¬ duct in the individual. Not that Young is consistent in his mistake. He sometimes implies no more than what is the truth — that the love of fame is the cause, not of all follies, but of many. Young’s satires on women are superior to Pope’s, which is only saying that they are superior to Pope’s greatest failure. We can more frequently pick out a couplet as successful than an entire sketch. Of the too emphatic Syrena he says: —■ “ Her judgmeut just, her sentence is too strong; Because she’s right, she’s ever in the wrong.” Of the diplomatic Julia: — “ For her own breakfast she ’ll project a scheme. Nor take her tea without a stratagem.” Of Lyce, the old painted coquette : — » “ In vain the cock has summoned sprites away; She walks at noon and blasts the bloom of day.” Of the nymph who, “ gratis, clears religious mysteries : ”— WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 39 “ ’T is hard, too, she who makes no use hut chat Of her religion, should be barred in that.” The description of the literary belle, Daphne, well pre¬ faces that of Stella, admired by Johnson: — “ With legs tossed high, on her sophee she sits, Vouchsafing audience to contending wits: Of each performance she’s the final test; One act read o’er, she prophesies the rest ; And then, pronouncing with decisive air. Fully convinces all the town — she’s fair. Had lonely Daphne Hecatessa’s face, How would her elegance of taste decrease ! Some ladies’ judgment in their features lies, And all their genius sparkles in their eyes. But hold, she cries, lampooner ! have a care ! Must I want common sense because I’m fair ? Oh no; see Stella : her eyes shine as bright As if her tongue was never in the right; And yet what real learning, judgment, fire ! She seems inspired, and can herself inspire. How then (if malice ruled not all the fair) Could Daphne publish, and could she forbear ? ” After all, when we Lave gone through Young’s seven Sa¬ tires, we seem to have made but an indifferent meal. They are a sort of fricassee, with some little solid meat in them, and yet the flavor is not always piquant. It is curious to find him, when he pauses a moment from his satiric sketch¬ ing, recurring to his old platitudes : — “ Can gold calm passion, or make reason shine 1 Can we dig peace or wisdom from the mine 1 Wisdom to gold prefer : ” — platitudes which he seems inevitably to fall into, for the same reason that some men are constantly asserting their contempt for criticism — because he felt the opposite so keenly. The outburst of genius in the earlier books of the “ Night Thoughts ” is the more remarkable, that, in the interval be¬ tween them and the Satires, he had produced nothing but his 40 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. Pindaric odes, in which he fell far below the level of his pre¬ vious works. Two sources of this sudden strength were the freedom of blank verse and the presence of a genuine emo¬ tion. Most persons, in speaking of the “ Night Thoughts,” have in their minds only the two or three first Nights ; the majority of readers rarely getting beyond these, unless, as Wilson says, they “ have but few books, are poor, and live in the country.” And in these earlier Nights there is enough genuine sublimity and genuine, sadness to bribe us into too favorable a judgment of them as a whole. Young had only a very few things to say or sing, — such as that life is vain, that death is imminent, that man is immortal, that virtue is wisdom, that friendship is sweet, and that the source of vir¬ tue is the contemplation of death and immortality, — and even in his two first Nights he had said almost all he had to say in his finest manner. Through these first outpourings of “complaint” we feel that the poet is really sad, that the bird is singing over a rifled nest; and we bear with his morbid picture of the world and of life, as the Job-like lament of a man whom “the hand of God hath touched.” Death has carried away his best-beloved, and that “silent land,” whither they are gone, has more reality for the desolate one than this world, which is empty of their love: — “ This is the desert, this the solitude ; How populous, how vital, is the grave ! ” Joy died with the loved one : — “ The disenchanted earth Lost all her lustre. Where her glittering towers ? Her golden mountains, where ? All darkened down To naked waste ; a dreary vale of tears : The great magician’s dead ! ” Under the pang of parting, it seems to the bereaved man as if love were only a nerve to suffer with, and he sickens at the thought of every joy of which he must one day say, “ It was” In its unreasoning anguish, the soul rushes to the idea of perpetuity as the one element of bliss : — WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 41 “ O ye blest scenes of permanent delight! Could ye, so rich in rapture, fear an end, — That ghastly thought would drink up all your joy, And quite unparadise the realms of light.” In a man under the immediate pressure of a great sorrow, we tolerate morbid exaggerations; we are prepared to see him turn away a weary eye from sunlight and flowers and sweet human faces, as if this rich and glorious life had no significance but as a preliminary of death ; we do not criticise his views, we compassionate his feelings. And so it is with Young in these earlier Nights. There is already some arti¬ ficiality even in his grief, and feeling often slides into rhetoric; but through it all we are thrilled with the unmis¬ takable cry of pain, which makes us tolerant of egoism and hyperbole : — “ In every varied posture, place, and hour, How widowed 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 42 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. i 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 ex¬ pressed. 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 lan¬ guage from genuine thought and feeling is what we are con¬ stantly 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 ah* WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 43 surdity 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 imag¬ ine how his heart can lean towards 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, — “ Ear 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 w ife, — 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 44 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 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 remem¬ brance that he has added to his “ debts of honor: ” — “ What wretched repetition cloys us here! What periodic potions for the sick, Distempered bodies, and distempered 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 Delilahs, 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 elo¬ quence would be shrivelled up. Place him on a breezy com¬ mon, 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 turn, 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 pas¬ sages which convey this sentiment the most explicitly. In the one, he gives Lorenzo this excellent recipe for obtain¬ ing cheerfulness: — WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 45 “ 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.” Tlie 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 possessed, On lightened 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, Rolling 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 46 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. the theatres, read the newspaper, and went home often by moon and star light. 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 blossomed trees overturned 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 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 47 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 in¬ ternal 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 second¬ ary manner with abstractions. An orator may discourse very eloquently on injustice in general, and leave his au¬ dience cold j 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 towards any one who professes strong feeling about abstractions, — in the interjectional “ humbug! ” which immediately rises to their lips. Wher¬ ever abstractions appear to excite strong emotion, this occurs in men of active intellect and imagination, in whom the ab¬ stract 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 feel¬ ing, would be infallibly prompted to the presentation of details. Strong emotion can no more be directed to generali¬ ties apart from particulars, than skill in figures can be di¬ rected to arithmetic apart from numbers. Generalities are the refuge at once of deficient intellectual activity and de¬ ficient 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, through¬ out this long poem, which professes to treat the various phases of man’s destiny. And even in the “Narcissa” Night, 48 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 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 con¬ templating it after the lapse of five years. Young, however, takes great pains to simulate a bad feeling: — “ Of grief And indignation rival bursts I poured, Half execration mingled with my prayer; Kindled at man, while I his God adored ; Sore grudged the savage land her sacred dust; Stamped the cursed soil; and with humanity [Denied Narcissa) wished them all a grave.” 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 t ” 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 con¬ sistency with Young’s theory of ethics : — “ Virtue is a crime, A crime to reason, if it costs us pain Unpaid.” WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 49 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 disdained, 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 boast, has told me he’s a knave. His duty ’t is 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 he a knave, and love yourself alone, if it were not for your belief in im¬ mortality; 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 towards myself, I have a fellow-feeling with other men, who would suffer the same pain if I were unjust or dishonest towards 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 4 VOL. IX. 50 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. wife and children and friends, and through that love I sym¬ pathize with like affections in other men. It is a pang to me to witness the sufferings of a fellow-being, and I feel his suffer¬ ing the more acutely because he is mortal , — because his life is so short, and I would have it, if possible, filled with hap¬ piness 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 yon may prefer to live the brute, to sell your country, or to slay your father, if yon were not afraid of some disagreeable consequences from the criminal laws of an¬ other 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 yon feel no motive to common morality, but your fear of a criminal bar in heaven, yon 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 conse¬ quences is a very insufficient barrier against the rush of im¬ mediate 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 egoisnj* 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 benevo¬ lence ; as the musician who would care less to play a sonata of Beethoven finely in solitude than in public, where he was to be paid for it, is wanting in genuine enthusiasm for music.” WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 51 Thus far might answer the man who “ denies himself im¬ mortal ; ” 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 Im¬ mortality expires.” We may admit, indeed, that if the better part of virtue consists, as Young appears to think, in con¬ tempt 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 our- * 'selves 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 52 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 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 in¬ dependent of theological ink, and that its evolution is ensured 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 deficien¬ cies in what he admires, more clearly than in what he con¬ temns,— in the sentiments he presents as laudable, rather than in those he decries. And in YYung’s notion of what is lofty he casts a shadow by which we can measure him with¬ out 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 jus¬ tice and mercy to brutes. WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 58 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 ad¬ dresses the Deity, discourses of the divine operations, or de¬ scribes 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 na'ive 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 meet¬ ing 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 severed 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 determined 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.” 54 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 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 hound of wrath omnipotent! It thunders; hut 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 “lec¬ tures ” mankind in the antithetic hyperbole of mortal and immortal joys, earth and the stars, hell and heaven, and ex¬ pects 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,” di¬ rected towards 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.” WORLDLINESS AND OTIIER-WORLDLINESS. 55 Virtue, with Young, must always squint, — must never look straight towards 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 afterwards ! 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 peda¬ gogic moralizing. On its theoretic and perceptive side, moral¬ ity 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 op¬ posed 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 in¬ sist 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 burnt 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 56 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 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 think¬ ing in apothegms, who has an unintermittent flux of admoni¬ tion, can have little energy left for simple emotion. And this is the case with Young. In his highest flights of con¬ templation, 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 re¬ criminates 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. Buskin the “pathetic fallacy,” so we may call Young’s dis¬ position, to see a rebuke or a warning in every natural object, the “pedagogic fallacy.” To his mind, the heavens are “for ever 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, apropos, 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 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 57 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 numbed, All godlike passion for eternals quenched. All relish of realities expired; Renounced all correspondence with the skies; Our freedom chained; quite wingless our desire ; In sense dark-prisoned 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 pre¬ sented 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 professedly 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 w T ho 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, — be¬ lieving that Christ died for all, and that the only obstacle to any man’s salvation lay in his will, which he could change if 58 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELTOT. he chose. There was real and deep sadness involved in Cow- per’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 towards inanimate and animate existence; in truthful¬ ness 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 presenta¬ tion 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 morn¬ ing sunlight on the commonest objects, at once disclosing every detail, and investing every detail with beauty ! Ho ob- ject 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 be¬ cause 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 WORLDLINESS AND OTIIER-WORLDLINESS. 59 “ 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 oncd, swdft 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 feigned alarm And anger insignificantly fierce.” And then he passes into reflection, not with curt apothegm and snappish reproof, but with that melodious flow of utter¬ ance 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 warmed ; ” 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 mani¬ fold 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 60 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. which have a direct influence on the welfare of communities and nations, there is the same unselflsh warmth of feeling, the same scrupulous truthfulness. He is never vague in his remonstrance or his satire; but puts his finger on some par¬ ticular vice or folly, which excites his indignation or “ dis¬ solves 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. Hot, 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 11 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 pro¬ duces “ 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, — WORLDLINESS AND OTIIER-WORLDLINESS. 61 “ 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 tlie,confines of our ether, flames: While (dreadful contrast!) far (how far!) beneath, Hell, bursting, belches forth her blazing seas, And storms sulphureous ; her voracious jaws Expanding wide, and roaring for her prey,” — Dr. Young, and similar “ ornaments of religion and virtue/ 7 passing of course with grateful “ applause ” into the upper region. Cowper finds his highest inspiration in the Millen¬ nium — 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.” And into what delicious melody his song flows at the thought of that blessedness to be enjoyed by future genera¬ tions on earth! — “ The dwellers in the vales and on the rocks , Shout to each other, and the mountain-tops From distant mountains catch the flying joy; Till, nation after nation taught the strain, Earth rolls the rapturous Hosanna round ! ” The sum of our comparison is this : In Young we have the type of that deficient human sympathy, that impiety towards 62 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. the present and the visible, which flies for its motives, its sanctities, and its religion, to the remote, the vague, and the unknown ; in Cowper we have the type of that genuine love which cherishes things in proportion to their nearness, and feels its reverence grow in proportion to the intimacy of its knowledge. GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. “ ""V7~0THING,” says Goethe, “is more significant of men’s -fi ^ character than what they find laughable.” The truth of this observation would perhaps have been more apparent if he had said culture instead of character. The last thing in which the cultivated man can have community with the vulgar is their jocularity; and we can hardly exhibit more strikingly the wide gulf which separates him from them, than by comparing the object which shakes the diaphragm of a coal-heaver, with the highly complex pleasure derived from a real witticism. That any high order of wit is exceedingly complex, and demands a ripe and strong mental development, has one evidence in the fact that we do not find it in boys at all in proportion to their manifestation of other powers. Clever boys generally aspire to the heroic and poetic rather than the comic, and the crudest of all their efforts are their jokes. Many a witty man will remember how in his school¬ days a practical joke, more or less Rabelaisian, was for him the ne plus ultra of the ludicrous. It seems to have been the same with the boyhood of the human race. The history and literature of the ancient Hebrews give the idea of a people who went about their business and their pleasure as gravely as a society of beavers ; the smile and the laugh are often mentioned metaphorically, but the smile is one of compla¬ cency, the laugh is one of scorn. ISTor can we imagine that the facetious element was very strong in the Egyptians; no laughter lurks in the wondering eyes and the broad calm lips of their statues. Still less can the Assyrians have had any genius for the comic; the round eyes and simpering 64 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. satisfaction of their ideal faces belong to a type which is not witty, but the cause of wit in others. The fun of these early races was, we fancy, of the after-dinner kind — loud-throated laughter over the wine-cup, taken too little account of in sober moments to enter as an element into their Art, and differing as much from the laughter of a Chamfort or a Sheri¬ dan as the gastronomic enjoyment of an ancient Briton, whose dinner had no other removes than from acorns to beechmast and back again to acorns, differed from the subtle pleasures of the palate experienced by his turtle-eating descendant. In fact they had to live seriously through the stages which to subsequent races were to become comedy, as those amiable- looking preadamite amphibia, which Professor Owen has re¬ stored for us in effigy at Sydenham, took perfectly au serieux the grotesque physiognomies of their kindred. Heavy ex¬ perience in their case, as in every other, was the base from which the salt of future wit was to be made. Humor is of earlier growth than wit, and it is in accord¬ ance with this earlier growth that it has more affinity with the poetic tendencies, while wit is more nearly allied to the ratiocinative intellect. Humor draws its materials from situations and characteristics; wit seizes on unexpected and complex relations. Humor is chiefly representative and descriptive; it is diffuse, and flows along without any other law than its own fantastic will; or it flits about like a will- of-the-wisp, amazing us by its whimsical transitions. Wit is brief and sudden, and sharply defined as a crystal; it does not make pictures, it is not fantastic; but it detects an un¬ suspected analogy or suggests a startling or confounding in¬ ference. Every one who has had the opportunity of making the comparison will remember that the effect produced on him by some witticisms is closely akin to the effect produced on him by subtle reasoning which lays open a fallacy or absurdity, and there are persons whose delight in such reason¬ ing always manifests itself in laughter. This affinity of wit with ratiocination is the more obvious in proportion as the species of wit is higher, and deals less with words and with GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 65 superficialities than with the essential qualities of things. Some of Johnson’s most admirable witticisms consist in the suggestion of an analogy which immediately exposes the absurdity of an action or proposition, and it is only their ingenuity, condensation, and instantaneousness which lift them from reasoning into wit; they are reasoning raised to a higher power. On the other hand, humor, in its higher forms, and in proportion as it associates itself with the sym¬ pathetic emotions, continually passes into poetry; nearly all great modern humorists may be called prose poets. Some confusion as to the nature of humor has been cre¬ ated by the fact, that those who have written most eloquently on it have dwelt almost exclusively on its higher forms, and have defined humor in general as the sympathetic presentation of incongruous elements in human nature and life 5 a defini¬ tion which only applies to its later development. A great deal of humor may co-exist with a great deal of barbarism, as we see in the Middle Ages; but the strongest flavor of the humor in such cases will come, not from sympathy, but more probably from triumphant egoism or intolerance; at best it will be the love of the ludicrous exhibiting itself in illustra¬ tions of successful cunning and of the lex talionis , as in “ Reineke Fuchs,” or shaking off in a holiday mood the yoke of a too exacting faith, as in the old Mysteries. Again, it is impossible to deny a high degree of humor to many practical jokes, but no sympathetic nature can enjoy them. Strange as the genealogy may seem, the original parentage of that wonderful and delicious mixture of fun, fancy, philosophy, and feeling, which constitutes modern humor, was probably the cruel mockery of a savage at the writhings of a suffering enemy, — such is the tendency of things towards the good and beautiful on this earth ! Probably the reason why high culture demands more complete harmony with its moral sympathies in humor than in wit, is that humor is in its nature more prolix — that it has not the direct and irresist¬ ible force of wit. Wit is an electric shock, which takes us by violence, quite independently of our predominant mental 6 VOL. IX. 68 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. disposition; but humor approaches us more deliberately and leaves us masters of ourselves. Hence it is, that while coarse and cruel humor has almost disappeared from contemporary literature, coarse and cruel wit abounds ; even refined men cannot help laughing at a coarse bon mot or a lacerating per¬ sonality, if the “ shock ” of the witticism is a powerful one; while mere fun will have no power over them if it jar on their moral taste. Hence, too, it is, that while wit is peren¬ nial, humor is liable to become superannuated. As is usual with definitions and classifications, however, this distinction between wit and humor does not exactly represent the actual fact. Like all other species, wit and humor overlap and blend with each other. There are bon mots, like many of Charles Lamb's, which are a sort of face¬ tious hybrids 5 we hardly know whether to call them witty or humorous ; there are rather lengthy descriptions or narra¬ tives, which, like Voltaire’s “ Micromegas,” would be more humorous if they were not so sparkling and antithetic, so pregnant with suggestion and satire, that we are obliged to call them witty. We rarely find wit untempered by humor, or humor without a spice of wit; and sometimes we find them both united in the highest degree in the same mind, as in Shakspeare and Moliere. A happy conjunction this, for wit is apt to be cold and thin-lipped and Mephistophe¬ lean in men who have no relish for humor, whose lungs do never crow like Chanticleer at fun and drollery; and broad¬ faced, rollicking humor needs the refining influence of wit. Indeed, it may be said that there is no really fine writing in which wit has not an implicit, if not an explicit, action. The wit may never rise to the surface, it may never flame out into a witticism; but it helps to give brightness and trans¬ parency, it warns off from flights and exaggerations which verge on the ridiculous; in every genre of writing it pre¬ serves a man from sinking into the genre ennuyeux. And it is eminently needed for this office in humorous writing ; for as humor has no limits imposed on it by its material, no law but its own exuberance, it is apt to become preposterous and GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 67 wearisome unless checked by wit, which is the enemy of all monotony, of all lengthiness, of all exaggeration. Perhaps the nearest approach Nature has given us to a complete analysis, in which wit is as thoroughly exhausted of humor as possible, and humor as bare as possible of wit, is in the typical Frenchman and the typical German. Vol¬ taire, the intensest example of pure wit, fails in most of his fictions from liis lack of humor. u Micromegas ” is a perfect tale, because, as it deals chiefly with philosophic ideas and does not touch the marrow of human feeling and life, the writer’s wit and wisdom were all-sufficient for his pur¬ pose. Not so with “Candide.” Here Voltaire had to give pictures of life as well as to convey philosophic truth and satire, and here we feel the want of humor. The sense of the ludicrous is continually defeated by disgust, and the scenes, instead of presenting us with an amusing or agreeable picture, are only the frame for a witticism. On the other hand, German humor generally shows no sense of measure, no instinctive tact; it is either floundering and clumsy as the antics of a leviathan, or laborious and interminable as a Lap- land day, in which one loses all hope that the stars and quiet will ever come. For this reason, Jean Paul, the greatest of German humorists, is unendurable to many readers, and fre¬ quently tiresome to all. Here, as elsewhere, the German shows the absence of that delicate perception, that sensibility to gradation, which is the essence of tact and taste, and the necessary concomitant of wit. All his subtlety is reserved for the region of metaphysics. For Identitat in the abstract, no one can have an acuter vision, but in the concrete he is satis¬ fied with a very loose approximation. He has the finest nose for Ew^pirismus in philosophical doctrine, but the presence of more or less tobacco-smoke in the air he breathes is imper¬ ceptible to him. To the typical German — Vetter Michel — it is indifferent whether his door-lock will catch; whether his tea-cup be more or less than an inch thick; whether or not his book have every other leaf unstitched; whether his neighbor’s conversation be more or less of a shout; whether 68 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. he pronounce b or p, t or d; whether or not his adored one’s teeth be few and far between. He has the same sort of in¬ sensibility to gradations in time. A German comedy is like a German sentence; you see no reason in its structure why it should ever come to an end, and you accept the conclusion as an arrangement of Providence rather than of the author. We have heard Germans use the word Langeweile , the equiv¬ alent for ennui, and we have secretly wondered what it can be that produces ennui in a German. Hot the longest of long tragedies, for we have known him to pronounce that hochst fesselnd (so enchaining !) ; not the heaviest of heavy books, for he delights in that as grundlich (deep, sir, deep! ) ; not the slowest of journeys in a Post-wage7i, for the slower the horses, the more cigars he can smoke before he reaches his journey’s end. German ennui must be something as super¬ lative as Barclay’s treble X, which, we suppose, implies an extremely unknown quantity of stupefaction. It is easy to see that this national deficiency in nicety of perception must have its effect on the national appreciation and exhibition of humor. You find in Germany ardent admirers of Shakspeare, who tell you that what they think most admirable in him is his Wortspiel, his verbal quibbles ; and one of these, a man of no slight culture and refinement, once cited to a friend of ours Proteus’s joke in “ The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” “Nod, I? why that’s Noddy,” as a transcendent specimen of Shakspearian wit. German face¬ tiousness is seldom comic to foreigners, and an Englishman with a swelled cheek might take up “ Kladderaclatsch,” the German “ Punch,” without any danger of agitating his facial muscles. Indeed, it is a remarkable fact that, among the five great races concerned in modern civilization, the German race is the only one which, up to the present century, had contributed nothing classic to the common stock of European wit and humor; for “ Reineke Fuchs ” cannot be regarded as a peculiarly Teutonic product. Italy was the birthplace of Pantomime and the immortal Pulcinello ; Spain had produced Cervantes; France had produced Rabelais and Moliere, and GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 69 classic wits innumerable ; England had yielded Shakspeare and a host of humorists. But Germany had borne no great comic dramatist, no great satirist, and she has not yet re¬ paired the omission ; she had not even produced any humorist of a high order. Among her great writers, Lessing is the one who is the most specifically witty. We feel the implicit influence of wit, the “ flavor of mind,” throughout his writings ; and it is often concentrated into pungent satire, as every reader of the “ Hamburgische Dramaturgic ” remem¬ bers. Still, Lessing’s name has not become European through his wit, and his charming comedy, “ Minna von Barnhelm,” has won no place on a foreign stage. Of course, we do not pretend to an exhaustive acquaintance with German litera¬ ture ; we not only admit, we are sure, that it includes much comic writing of which we know nothing. We simply state the fact, that no German production of that kind, before the present century, ranked as European; a fact which does not, indeed, determine the amount of the national facetiousness, but which is quite decisive as to its quality . Whatever may be the stock of fun which Germany yields for home-consump¬ tion, she has provided little for the palate of other lands. All honor to her for the still greater things she has done for us ! She has fought the hardest fight for freedom of thought, has produced the grandest inventions, has made magnificent contributions to science, has given us some of the divinest poetry, and quite the divinest music, in the world. No one reveres and treasures the products of the German mind more than we do. To say that that mind is not fertile in wit, is only like saying that excellent wheat-land is not rich pasture ; to say that we do not enjoy German facetiousness, is no more than to say that, though the horse is the finest of quadrupeds, wp do not like him to lay his hoof playfully on our shoulder. St 11, as we have noticed that the pointless puns and stupid jor ularity of the boy may ultimately be developed into the ep grammatic brilliancy and polished playfulness of the man, as we believe that racy wit and chastened delicate humor , are Inevitably the results of invigorated and refined mental 70 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. activity, we can also believe that Germany will, one day, yield a crop of wits and humorists. Perhaps there is already an earnest of that future crop in the existence of Heinrich Heine, a German born with the present century, who, to Teutonic imagination, sensibility, and humor, adds an amount of esprit that would make him brilliant among the most brilliant of Frenchmen. True, this unique German wit is half a Hebrew; but he and his ances¬ tors spent their youth in German air, and were reared on Wurst and Sauerkraut, so that he is as much a German as a pheasant is an English bird, or a potato an Irish vegetable. But whatever else he may be, Pleine is one of the most remark¬ able men of this age : no echo, but a real voice, and therefore, like all genuine things in this world, worth studying; a sur¬ passing lyric poet, who has uttered our feelings for us in delicious song; a humorist, who touches leaden folly with the magic wand of his fancy, and transmutes it into the fine gold of art — who sheds his sunny smile on human tears, and makes them a beauteous rainbow on the cloudy background of life ; a wit, who holds in his mighty hand the most scorch¬ ing lightnings of satire ; an artist in prose literature, who has shown even more completely than Goethe the possibilities of German prose ; and — in spite of all charges against him, true as well as false — a lover of freedom, who has spoken wise and brave words on behalf of his fellow-men. He is, moreover, a suffering man, who, with all the highly wrought sensibility of genius, has to endure terrible physical ills; and as such he calls forth more than an intellectual interest. It is true, alas ! that there is a heavy weight in the other scale — that Heine’s magnificent powers have often served only to give electric force to the expression of debased feeling, so that his works are no Phidian statue of gold and ivory and gems, but have not a little brass and iron and miry clay mingled with the precious metal. The audacity of his occa¬ sional coarseness and personality is unparalleled in contem porary literature, and has hardly been exceeded by the license , of former days. Hence, before his volumes are put within GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 71 the reach of immature minds, there is need of a friendly pen¬ knife to exercise a strict censorship. Yet, when all coarse¬ ness, all scurrility, all Mephistophelean contempt for the reverent feelings of other men, is removed, there will be a plenteous remainder of exquisite poetry, of wit, humor, and just thought. It is apparently too often a congenial task to write severe words about the transgressions committed by men of genius, especially when the censor has the advantage of being himself a man of no genius, so that those transgres¬ sions seem to him quite gratuitous 5 he, forsooth, never lac¬ erated any one by his wit, or gave irresistible piquancy to a coarse allusion, and his indignation is not mitigated by any knowledge of the temptation that lies in transcendent power. We are also apt to measure what a gifted man has done by our arbitrary conception of what he might have done, rather than by a comparison of his actual doings with our own or those of other ordinary men. We make ourselves over- zealous agents of heaven, and demand that our brother should bring usurious interest for his five Talents, forgetting that it is less easy to manage live Talents than two. Whatever ben,- efit there may be in denouncing the evil, it is after all more edifying, and certainly more cheering, to appreciate the good. Hence, in endeavoring to give our readers some account of Heine and his works, we shall not dwell lengthily on his fail¬ ings ; we shall not hold the candle up to dusty, vermin- haunted corners, but let the light fall as much as possible on the nobler and more attractive details. Our sketch of Heine’s life, which has been drawn from various sources, will be free from everything like intrusive gossip, and will derive its coloring chiefly from the autobiographical hints and descrip¬ tions scattered through his own writings. Those of our read¬ ers who happen to know nothing of Heine, will in this way be making their acquaintance with the writer while they are learning the outline of his career. We have said that Heine was born with the present century ; but this statement is not precise, for we learn that, according to his certificate of baptism, he was born December 72 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 12, 1799. However, as he himself says, the important point is, that he was born, and born on the banks of the Rhine at Diisseldorf, where his father was a merchant. In his u Reisebilder ” he gives us some recollections, in his wild poetic way, of the dear old town where he spent his child¬ hood, and of his school boy troubles there. We shall quote from these in butterfly fashion, sipping a little nectar here and there, without regard to any strict order : — “ I first saw the light on the banks of that lovely stream, where folly grows on the green hills, and in autumn is plucked, pressed, poured into casks, and sent into foreign lands. Believe me, I yester¬ day heard some one utter folly which, in anno 1811 , lay in a bunch of grapes I then saw growing on the Johannisberg. . . . Mon Dieu! if I had only such faith in me that I could remove mountains, the Johan¬ nisberg would be the very mountain I should send for wherever I might be; but as my faith is not so strong, imagination must help me, and it transports me at once to the lovely Rhine. ... I am again a child, and playing with other children on the Schlossplatz, at Diisseldorf on the Rhine. Yes, madam, there was I born; and I note this expressly, in case, after my death, seven cities — Schilda, Kriih- winkel, Polkwitz, Bockum, Diilken, Gottingen, and Schoppenstadt — should contend for the honor of being my birthplace. Diisseldorf is a town on the Rhine; sixteen thousand men live there, and many hundred thousand men besides lie buried there. . . . Among them, many of whom my mother says that it would be better if they were still living, — for example, my grandfather and my uncle, the old Herr von Geldern, and the young Herr von Geldern, both such celebrated doc¬ tors, who saved so many men from death, and yet must die themselves. And the pious Ursula, who carried me in her arms when I was a child, also lies buried there, and a rosebush grows on her grave; she loved the scent of roses so well in life, and her heart was pure rose-incense and goodness. The knowing old Canon, too, lies buried there. Heavens, what an object he looked when I last saw him ! He was made up of nothing but mind and plasters , and nevertheless studied day and night, as if he were alarmed lest the worms should find an idea too little in his head. And the little William lies there, and for this I am to blame. We were schoolfellows in the Franciscan mon¬ astery, and were playing on that side of it where the Dussel flows be¬ tween stone walls; and I said, 1 William, fetch out the kitten that GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 73 has just fallen in ; 7 and merrily he went down on to the plank which lay across the brook, snatched the kitten out of the water, but fell in himself, and was dragged out dripping and dead. The kitten lived to a good old age. . . . Princes in that day were not the tormented race as they are now; the crown grew firmly on their heads, and at night they drew a nightcap over it, and slept peacefully, and peacefully slept the people at their feet; and when the people waked in the morn¬ ing, they said, ‘Good-morning, father P and the princes answered, ‘ Good-morning, dear children ! 7 But it was suddenly quite otherwise; for when we awoke one morning at Diisseldorf, and were ready to say, ‘ Good-morning, father ! 7 — lo ! the father was gone away; and in the whole town there was nothing but dumb sorrow, everywhere a sort of funeral disposition; and people glided along silently to the market, and read the long placard placed on the door of the Town Hall. It was dismal weather; yet the lean tailor, Kilian, stood in his nankeen jacket, which he usually wore only in the house, and his blue worsted stockings hung down so that his naked legs peeped out mournfully, and his thin lips trembled while he muttered the announcement to himself. And an old soldier read rather louder, and at many a word a crystal tear trickled down to his brave old mustache. I stood near him and wept in company, and asked him why we wept ? He answered, ‘The Elector has abdicated. 7 And then he read again; and at the words, ‘ for the long-manifested fidelity of my subjects, 7 and ‘ hereby set you free from your allegiance, 7 he wept more than ever. It is strangely touching to see an old man like that, with faded uni¬ form and scarred face, weep so bitteily all of a sudden. While we were reading, the Electoral arms were taken down from the Town Hall; everything had such a desolate air, that it was as if an eclipse of the sun were expected. ... I went home and wept, and wailed out, ‘The Elector has abdicated! 7 In vain my mother took a world of trouble to explain the thing to me. I knew what I knew; I was not to be persuaded, but went crying to bed, and in the night dreamed that the world was at an end. 77 The next morning, however, the snn rises as usual, and Joachim Murat is proclaimed Grand Duke, whereupon there is a holiday at the public school, and Heinrich (or Harry, for that was his baptismal name, which he afterwards had the good taste to change), perched on the bronze horse of the Electoral statue, sees quite a different scene from yesterday’s : — 74 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. u The next day the world was again all in order, and we had school as before, and things were got by heart as before; the Roman em¬ perors, chronology, the nouns in im, the verba irregularia , Greek, Hebrew, geography, mental arithmetic!—heavens! my head is still dizzy with it — all must be learned by heart! And a great deal of this came very conveniently for me in after life. For if I had not known the Roman kings by heart, it would subsequently have been quite in¬ different to me whether Niebuhr had proved or had not proved that they never really existed. . . . But oh! the trouble I had at school with the endless dates. And with arithmetic it was still worse. What I understood best was subtraction, for that has a very practical rule: 1 Four can’t be taken from three, therefore I must borrow one.’ But I advise every one in such a case to borrow a few extra pence, for no one can tell what may happen. ... As for Latin, you have no idea, madam, what a complicated affair it is. The Romans would never have found time to conquer the world if they had first had to learn Latin. Luckily for them, they already knew in their cradles what nouns have their accusative in im. I, on the contrary, had to learn them by heart in the sweat of my brow; nevertheless, it is fortunate for me that I know them; . . . and the fact that I have them at my finger-ends if I should ever happen to want them suddenly, affords me much inward repose and consolation in many troubled hours of fife. . . . Of Greek I will not say a word, I should get too much irritated. The monks in the Middle Ages were not so far wrong when they main¬ tained that Greek was an invention of the devil. God knows the suf¬ fering I endured over it. . . . With Hebrew it went somewhat better, for I had always a great liking for the Jews, though to this very hour they crucify my good name ) but I could never get on so far in Hebrew as my watch, which had much familiar intercourse with pawnbrokers, and in this way contracted many Jewish habits,—for example, it wouldn’t go on Saturdays.” Heine’s parents were apparently not wealthy, but his edu¬ cation was cared for by his uncle, Solomon Heine, a great banker in Hamburg, so that he had no early pecuniary dis¬ advantages to struggle with. He seems to have been very happy in his mother, who was not of Hebrew, but of Teutonic blood; he often mentions her with reverence and affection, and in the “ Buch der Lieder ” there are two exquisite sonnets addressed to her, which tell how his proud spirit was always GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 75 subdued by the charm of her presence, and how her love was the home of his heart after restless weary ramblings: — “ Wie machtig auch mein stolzer Muth sick blahe. In deiner selig siissen, trauten Nahe Ergreift mich oft ein demuthvolles Zagen. • • • • • Und immer irrte ieh nach Liebe, immer Nach Liebe, doch die Liebe fand ich nimmer, Und kehrte um nach Hanse, krank und triibe. Doch da bist du entgegen mir gekommen, Und ach ! was da in deinem Aug’ geschwommen, Das war die siisse, langgesuchte Liebe.” He was at first destined for a mercantile life, but nature declared too strongly against this plan. “ God knows/’ he has lately said in conversation with his brother, “ I would will¬ ingly have become a banker, but I could never bring myself to that pass. I very early discerned that bankers would one day be the rulers of the world.” So commerce was at length given up for law, the study of which he began in 1819 at the University of Bonn. He had already published some poems in the corner of a newspaper, and among them was one on Napoleon, the object of his youthful enthusiasm. This poem, he says in a letter to St. Rene Taillandier, was written when he was only sixteen. It is still to be found in the “ Buch der Lieder ” under the title “ Die Grenadiere,” and it proves that even in its earliest efforts his genius showed a strongly specific character. It will be easily imagined that the germs of poetry sprouted too vigorously in Heine’s brain for jurisprudence to find much room there. Lectures on historv and literature, we are told, were more diligently attended than lectures on law. He had taken care, too, to furnish his trunk with abundant editions of the poets, and the poet he especially studied at that time was Byron. At a later period we find his taste taking another direction, for he writes: “ Of all authors, Byron is precisely the one who excites in me the most intol¬ erable emotion; whereas Scott, in every one of his works, 76 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. gladdens my heart, soothes and invigorates me.” Another indication "of his bent in these Bonn days was a newspaper essay, in which he attacked the Romantic School; and here also he went through that chicken-pox of authorship, the production of a tragedy. Heine’s tragedy, “ Almansor,” is, as might be expected, better than the majority of these youthful mistakes. The tragic collision lies in the conflict between natural affection and the deadly hatred of religion and of race, in the sacrifice of youthful lovers to the strife between Moor and Spaniard, Moslem and Christian. Some of the situations are striking, and there are passages of con¬ siderable poetic merit; but the characters are little more than shadowy vehicles for the poetry, and there is a want of clearness and probability in the structure. It was pub¬ lished two years later, in company with another tragedy in one act, called u William Ratcliffe,” in which there is rather a feeble use of the Scotch second-sight after the manner of the Rate in the Greek tragedy. We smile to find Heine say¬ ing of his tragedies, in a letter to a friend soon after their publication: “ I know they will be terribly cut up, but I will confess to you in confidence that they are very good, better than my collection of poems, which are not worth a shot.” Elsewhere he tells us, that when, after one of Paganini’s con¬ certs, he was passionately complimenting the great master on his violin-playing, Paganini interrupted him thus: u But how were you pleased with my bows ? ” In 1820 Heine left Bonn for Gottingen. He there pursued his omission of law studies ; and at the end of three months he was rusticated for a breach of the laws against duelling. Whilst there he had attempted a negotiation with Brockhaus for the printing of a volume of poems, and had endured the first ordeal of lovers and poets, a refusal. It was not until a year after, that he found a Berlin publisher for his first volume of poems, subsequently transformed, with additions, into the “ Buch der Lieder.” He remained between two and three years at Berlin, and the society he found there seems to have made these years an important epoch in his culture. GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 77 He was one of the youngest members of a circle which as¬ sembled at the house of the poetess Elise von Hohenhausen, the translator of Byron, a circle which included Chamisso, Varnhagen, and Bahel (Yarnliagen’s wife). Eor Bahel, Heine had a profound admiration and regard; he afterwards dedi¬ cated to her the poems included under the title “ ITeimkehr; ” and he frequently refers to her or quotes her in a way that indicates how. he valued her influence. According to his friend, F. von Hohenhausen, the opinions concerning Heine’s talent were very various among his Berlin friends, and it was only a small minority that had any presentiment of his future fame. In this minority was Elise von Hohenhausen, who proclaimed Heine as the Byron of Germany ; but her opinion was met with much head-shaking and opposition. We can imagine how precious was such a recognition as hers to the young poet, then only two or three and twenty, and with by no means an impressive personality for superficial eyes. Per¬ haps even the deep-sighted were far from detecting in that small, blond, pale young man, with quiet, gentle manners, the latent powers of ridicule and sarcasm — the terrible talons that were one day to be thrust out from the velvet paw of the young leopard. It was apparently during this residence in Berlin that Heine united himself with the Lutheran Church. He would willingly, like many of his friends, he tells us, have remained free from all ecclesiastical ties, if the authorities there had not forbidden residence in Prussia, and especially in Berlin, to every one who did not belong to one of the positive religions recognized by the state. “ As Henry IY. once laughingly said, ‘ Paris vaut bien une messe ,’ so T might with reason say, Berlin vaut bien une pieche; and I could afterwards, as before, accommodate myself to the very enlightened Christianity, filtrated from all superstition, which could then be had in the churches of Berlin, and which was even free from the divinity of Christ, like turtle-soup without turtle.” At the same period, too, Heine became acquainted with Hegel. In his lately published “ Gestandnisse ” (Confes- T8 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. sions), he throws on Hegel’s influence over him the blue light of demoniacal wit, and confounds us by the most bewildering double-edged sarcasms; but that influence seems to have been at least more wholesome than the one which produced the mocking retractations of the “ Gestandnisse.” Through all his self-satire, we discern that in those days he had some¬ thing like real earnestness and enthusiasm, which are cer¬ tainly not apparent in his present theistic confession of faith. u On the whole, I never felt a strong enthusiasm for this philosophy, and conviction on the subject was out of question. I never was an abstract thinker, and I accepted the synthesis of the Hegelian doctrine without demanding any proof, since its consequences flattered my vanity. I was young and proud; and it pleased my vainglory when I learned from Hegel that the true God was not, as my grandmother believed, the God who lives in heaven, but myself here upon earth. This foolish pride had not in the least a pernicious influence on my feel¬ ings : on the contrary, it heightened these to the pitch of heroism. I was at that time so lavish in generosity and self-sacrifice, that I must assuredly have eclipsed the most brilliant deeds of those good bourgeois of virtue who acted merely from a sense of duty, and simply obeyed the laws of morality.” His sketch of Hegel is irresistibly amusing; but we must warn the reader that Heine’s anecdotes are often mere devices of style by which he conveys his satire or opinions. The reader will see that he does not neglect an opportunity of giving a sarcastic lash or two, in passing, to Meyerbeer, for whose music he had a great contempt. The sarcasm conveyed in the substitution of reputation for music , and journalists for musicians , might perhaps escape any one unfamiliar with the sly and unexpected turns of Heine’s ridicule. u To speak frankly, I seldom understood him, and only arrived at the meaning of his words by subsequent reflection. I believe he wished not to be understood; and hence his practice of sprinkling his discourse with modifying parentheses; hence, perhaps, his preference for persons of whom he knew that they did not understand him, and to whom he all the more willingly granted the honor of his familiar GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 79 acquaintance. Thus every one in Berlin wondered at the intimate com¬ panionship of the profound Hegel with the late Heinrich Beer, a brother of Giacomo Meyerbeer, who is universally known by his rep¬ utation, and who has been celebrated by the cleverest journalists. This Beer, namely Heinrich, was a thoroughly stupid fellow, and indeed was afterwards actually declared imbecile by his family, and placed under guardianship; because instead of making a name for himself in art or in science by means of his great fortune, he squandered his money on childish trifles, — and, for example, one day bought six thousand thalers 7 worth of walking-sticks. This poor man, who had no wish to pass either for a great tragic dramatist, or for a great star¬ gazer, or for a laurel-crowned musical genius, a rival of Mozart and Rossini, and preferred giving his money for walking-sticks — this degenerate Beer enjoyed Hegel’s most confidential society ; he was the philosopher’s bosom-friend, his Pylades, and accompanied him every¬ where like his shadow. The equally witty and gifted Felix Mendels¬ sohn once sought to explain this phenomenon, by maintaining that Hegel did not understand Heinrich Beer. I now believe, however, that the real ground of that intimacy consisted in this : Hegel was con¬ vinced that no word of what he said was understood by Heinrich Beer; and he could therefore, in his presence, give himself up to all the in¬ tellectual outpourings of the moment. In general, Hegel’s conversa¬ tion was a sort of monologue, sighed forth by starts in a noiseless voice; the odd roughness of his expressions often struck me, and many of them have remained in my memory. One beautiful starlight evening we stood together at the window, and I, a young man of one-and-twenty, having just, had a good dinner and finished my coffee, spoke with en¬ thusiasm of the stars, and called them the habitations of the departed. But the master muttered to himself: ‘ The stars ! hum ! hum ! The stars are only a brilliant leprosy on the face of the heavens.’ 1 For God’s sake,’ I cried, 1 is there, then, no happy place above, where virtue is rewarded after death ? ’ But he, staring at me with his pale eyes, said, cuttingly: ‘ So you want a bonus for having taken care of your sick mother, and refrained from poisoning your worthy brother?’ At these words he looked anxiously round, but appeared immediately set at rest when he observed that it was only Heinrich Beer, who had approached to invite him to a game at whist.” In 1823 Heine returned to Gottingen to complete his career as a law-student, and this time he gave evidence of advanced 80 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. mental maturity, not only by producing many of the charming poems subsequently included in the “ Reisebilder,” but also by prosecuting his professional studies diligently enough to leave Gottingen, in 1825, as Doctor juris. Hereupon he settled at Hamburg as an advocate, but his profession seems to have been the least pressing of his occupations. In those days a small blond young man, with the brim of his hat drawn over his nose, his coat flying open, and his hands stuck in his trouser-pockets, might have been seen stumbling along the streets of Hamburg, staring from side to side, and appearing to have small regard to the figure he made in the eyes of the good citizens. Occasionally an inhabitant, more literary than usual, would point out this young man to his companion as Heinrich Heine ; but in general the young poet had not to endure the inconveniences of being a lion. His poems were devoured, but he was not asked to devour flattery in return. Whether because the fair Hamburgers acted in the spirit of Johnson’s advice to Hannah More, —to “ consider what her flattery was worth before she choked him with it,” — or for some other reason, Heine, according to the testimony of August Lewald, to whom we owe these particulars of his Hamburg life, was left free from the persecution of tea- parties. Not, however, from another persecution of genius, nervous headaches, — which some persons, we are told, re¬ garded as an improbable fiction, intended as a pretext for rais¬ ing a delicate white hand to his forehead. It is probable that the sceptical persons alluded to were themselves untroubled with nervous headache, and that their hands were not delicate. Slight details these, but worth telling about a man of genius, because they help us to keep in mind that he is, after all, our brother, having to endure the petty every-day ills of life as we have; with this difference, that his heightened sensibility converts what are mere insect-stings for us into scorpion- stings for him. It was, perhaps, in these Hamburg days that Heine paid the visit to Goethe, of which he gives us this charming little picture: —- GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 81 “ When I visited him in Weimar, and stood before him, I involun¬ tarily glanced at his side, to see whether the eagle was not there with the lightning in his beak. I was nearly speaking Greek to him ; but, as I observed that he understood German, I stated to him in German, that the plums on the road between Jena and Weimar were very good. I had for so many long winter-nights thought over what lofty and pro¬ found things I would say to Goethe, if ever I saw him ! And when I saw him at last,.I said to him, that the Saxon plums were very good ! And Goethe smiled.” During the next few years Heine produced the most pop¬ ular of all his works, those which have won him his place as the greatest of living German poets and humorists. Be¬ tween 1826 and 1829 appeared the four volumes of the “ Reisebilder ” (Pictures of Travel), and the “ Buch der Lie- der ” (Book of Songs) — a volume of lyrics, of which it is hard to say whether their greatest charm is the lightness and finish of their style, their vivid and original imaginativeness, or their simple, pure sensibility. In his “ Reisebilder,” Heine carries us with him to the Harz, to the isle of Nor- derney, to his native town, Diisseldorf, to Italy, and to Eng¬ land, sketching scenery and character, now with the wildest, most fantastic humor, now with the finest idyllic sensibility — letting his thoughts wander from poetry to politics, from criticism to dreamy reverie, and blending fun, imagination, reflection, and satire in a sort of exquisite, ever-varying shimmer, like the hues of the opal. Heine’s journey to England did not at all heighten his regard for the English. He calls our language the “hiss of egoism ” (Zischlaute des Egoismus ) ; and his ridicule of Eng¬ lish awkwardness is as merciless as English ridicule of Ger¬ man awkwardness. His antipathy towards us seems to have grown in intensity, like many of his other antipathies ; and in his “Vermiselite Schriften” he is more bitter than ever. Let us quote one of his philippics, since bitters are under¬ stood to be wholesome. “It is certainly a frightful injustice to pronounce sentence of con- 1 demnation on an entire people. But with regard to the English, mo- VOL. IX. 6 82 ESSAYS OF GEORGE. ELIOT. mentary disgust might betray me into this injustice; and on looking at the mass, I easily forget the many brave and noble men who dis¬ tinguished themselves by intellect and love of freedom. But these, especially the British poets, were always all the more glaringly in con¬ trast with the rest of the nation ; they were isolated martyrs to their national relations; and, besides, great geniuses do not belong to the particular land of their birth; they scarcely belong to this earth, the Golgotha of their sufferings. The mass — the English blockheads, God forgive me! — are hateful to me in my inmost soul; and I often regard them not at all as my fellow-men, but as miserable automata — machines, whose motive power is egoism. In these moods it seems to me as if I heard the whizzing wheelwork by which they think, feel, reckon, digest, and pray; their praying, their mechanical Anglican church-going, with the gilt prayer-book under their arms, their stupid, tiresome Sunday, their awkward piety, are most of all odious to me. I am firmly convinced that a blaspheming Frenchman is a more pleas¬ ing sight for the Divinity than a praying Englishman.” On his return from England, Heine was employed at Mu¬ nich in editing the “ Allgemeinen Politischen Annalen,” but in 1830 he was again in the North, and the news of .the July Revolution surprised him on the island of Heligoland. He has given us a graphic picture of his democratic enthusiasm in those days, in some letters, apparently written from Heli¬ goland, which he had inserted in his book on Borne. We quote some passages, not only for their biographic interest as showing a phase of Heine’s mental history, but because they are a specimen of his power in that kind of dithyram- bic writing which, in less masterly hands, easily becomes ridiculous. “The thick packet of newspapers arrived from the Continent with these warm, glowing-hot tidings. They were sunbeams wrapped up in packing-paper, and they inflamed my soul till it burst into the wildest conflagration. ... It is all like a dream to me j especially the name, Lafayette, sounds to me like a legend out of my earliest childhood. Does he really sit again on horseback, commanding the National Guard '? I almost fear it may not be true, for it is in print. I will myself go to Paris, to be convinced of it with my bodily eyes. . . . It must be splendid, when he rides through the streets, the citizen of GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 83 two worlds, the godlike old man, with his silver locks streaming down his sacred shoulder. . . . He greets, with his dear old eyes, the grandchildren of those who once fought with him for freedom and equality. ... It is now sixty years since he returned from America with the Declaration of Human Rights, the Decalogue of the world’s new creed, which was revealed to him amid the thunders and light¬ nings of cannon. . . . And the tri-colored flag waves again on the towers of Paris, and its streets resound with the Marseillaise! ... It is all over with my yearning for repose. I now know again what I will do, what I ought to do, what I must do. ... I am the son of the Revolution, and seize again the hallowed weapons on which my mother pronounced her magic benediction. . . . Flowers, flowers ! I will crown my head for the death-fight. And the lyre, too; reach me the lyre, that I may sing a battle-song. . . . Words like flaming stars, that shoot down from the heavens, and burn up the palaces, and illuminate the huts. . . . Words like bright javelins, that whirr up to the seventh heaven and strike the pious hypocrites who have skulked into the Holy of Holies. ... I am all joy and song, all sword and flame! Perhaps, too, all delirium. . . . One of those sunbeams wrapped in brown paper has flown to my brain, and set my thoughts aglow. In vain I dip my head into the sea. No water extinguishes this Greek fire. . . . Even the poor Heligolanders shout for joy, although they have only a sort of dim instinct of what has occurred. The fisherman who yesterday took me over to the little sand-island, which is the bathing-place here, said to me smilingly, 1 The poor people have won! 7 Yes, instinctively the people comprehend such events, perhaps, better than we, with all our means of knowledge. Thus Frau von Yarnhagen once told me that when the issue of the battle of Leipzig was not yet known, the maid-servant suddenly rushed into the room with the sorrowful cry, 1 The nobles have won ! 7 . . . This morning another packet of newspapers is come. I devour them like manna. Child that I am, affecting details touch me yet more than the momentous whole. Oh, if I could but see the dog Medor. . . . The dog Medor brought his master his gun and cartridge-box, and when his master fell, and was buried with his fellow-heroes in the Court of the Louvre, there stayed the poor dog like a monument of faithfulness, sitting motionless on the grave, day and night, eating bat. little of the food that was offered him, — burying the greater part of it in the earth, perhaps as nourishment for his buried master. 77 84 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. The enthusiasm which was kept thus at boiling heat by imagination, cooled down rapidly when brought into contact with reality. In the same book he indicates, in his caustic way, the commencement of that change in his political tem¬ perature — for it cannot be called a change in opinion — which has drawn down on him immense vituperation from some of the Patriotic party, but which seems to have resulted simply from the essential antagonism between keen wit and fanaticism. “ On the very first days of my arrival in Paris, I observed that things wore, in reality, quite different colors from those which had been shed on them, when in perspective, by the light of my enthusiasm. The silver locks which I saw’ fluttering so majestically on the shoulders of Lafayette, the hero of two worlds, w^ere metamorphosed into a brown peruke, which made a pitiable covering for a narrow skull. And even the dog Medor, which I visited in the Court of the Louvre, and which, encamped under tri-colored flags and trophies, very quietly allow’ed himself to he fed, — he was not at all the right dog, hut quite an ordinary brute, who assumed to himself merits not his ow T n, as often happens with the French ; and, like many others, he made a profit out of the glory of the Revolution. . . . He w r as pampered and patronized, perhaps promoted to the highest posts, while the true Medor, some days after the battle, modestly slunk out of sight, like the true people who created the Revolution.” That it was not merely interest in French politics which sent Heine to Paris in 1831, but also a perception that Ger¬ man air was not friendly to sympathizers in July Revolutions, is humorously intimated in the “ Gestandnisse.” “ I had done much and suffered much, and when the sun of the July Revolution arose in France, I had become very weary and needed some recreation. Also my native air w r as every day more unhealthy for me, and it w r as time I should seriously think of a change of cli¬ mate. I had visions; the clouds terrified me, and made all sorts of ugly faces at me. It often seemed to me as if the sun were a Prussian cockade; at night I dreamed of a hideous black eagle, wdiich gnawed my liver; and I w 7 as very melancholy. Add to this, I had become acquainted with an old Berlin Justizrath, who had spent many years GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 85 in the fortress of Spandau, and he related to me how unpleasant it is when one is obliged to wear irons in winter. For myself I thought it very unchristian that the irons were not warmed a trifle. If the irons were warmed a little for us, they would not make so unpleasant an im¬ pression, and even chilly natures might then hear them very well; it would he only proper consideration, too, if the fetters were perfumed with essence of roses and laurels, as is the case in this country [France]. I asked my J ustizratk whether he often got oysters to eat at Spandau. He said, ‘No, Spandau was too far from the sea.’ Moreover, he said meat was very scarce there, and there was no kind of volatile except flies, which fell into one’s soup. . . . Now, as I really needed some recreation, and, as Spandau is too far from the sea for oysters to be got there, and the Spandau fly-soup did not seem very appetizing to me; as, besides all this, the Prussian chains are very cold in winter, and could not be conducive to my health, I resolved to visit Paris.” Since this time Paris has been Heine’s home, and his best prose works have been written either to inform the Germans on French affairs, or to inform the French on German phi¬ losophy and literature. He became a correspondent of the “ Allgemeine Zeitung,”and his correspondence, which extends, with an interruption of several years, from 1831 to 1844, forms the volume entitled “ Franzosische Zustamde ” (French Affairs), and the second and third volume of his “ Vermischte Schriften.” It is a witty and often wise commentary on pub¬ lic men and public events. Louis Philippe, Casimir Perier, Thiers, Guizot, Rothschild, the Catholic party, the Socialist party, have their turn of satire and appreciation; for Heine deals out both with an impartiality which made his less favorable critics — Borne, for example — charge him with the rather incompatible sins of reckless caprice and venality. Literature and art alternate with politics: we have now a sketch of George Sand, or a description of one of Horace Ver- net’s pictures; now a criticism of Victor Hugo, or of Liszt; now an irresistible caricature of Spontini or Kalkbrenner; and occasionally the predominant satire is relieved by a fine saying, or a genial word of admiration. And all is done with that airy lightness, yet precision of touch, which distinguishes 8(3 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. Heine beyond any living writer. The charge of venality was loudly made against Heine in Germany: first, it was said that he was paid to write; then, that he was paid to abstain from writing; and the accusations were supposed to have an irrefragable basis in the fact that he accepted a stipend from the French government. He has never attempted to conceal the reception of that stipend, and we think his statement (in the “Vermischte Schriften”) of the circumstances under which it was offered and received, is a sufficient vindication of himself and M. Guizot from any dishonor in the matter. It may be readily imagined that Heine, with so large a share of the Gallic element as he has in his composition, was soon at his ease in Parisian society, and the years here were bright with intellectual activity and social enjoyment. “ His wit,” wrote August Lewald, a is a perpetual gushing foun¬ tain; he throws off the most delicious descriptions with amazing facility, and sketches the most comic characters in conversations.” Such a man could not be neglected in Paris, and Heine was sought on all sides — as a guest in distin¬ guished salons, as a possible proselyte in the circle of the Saint Simonians. His literary productiveness seems to have been furthered by this congenial life, which, however, was soon to some extent embittered by the sense of exile; for since 1835 both his works and his person have been the object of denunciation by the German governments. Between 1833 and 1845 appeared the four volumes of the “ Salon,” u Die Bomantische Schule ” (both written, in the first in¬ stance, in French); the book on Borne ; “ Atta Troll,” a roman¬ tic poem; “ Deutschland,” an exquisitely humorous poem, describing his last visit to Germany, and containing some grand passages of serious writing; and the “Neue Gedichte,” a collection of lyrical poems. Among the most interesting of his prose works are the second volume of the “ Salon,” which contains a survey of religion and philosophy in Ger¬ many, and the u Bomantische Schule,” a delightful introduc¬ tion to that phase of German literature known as the Bomantic School. The book on Borne, which appeared in GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 87 1840, two years after the death of that writer, excited great indignation in Germany, as a wreaking of vengeance on the dead, an insult to the memory of a man who had worked and suffered in the cause of freedom — a cause which was Heine’s own. Borne — we may observe parenthetically, for the in¬ formation of those who are not familiar with recent German literature — was a remarkable political writer of the ultra¬ liberal party in Germany, who resided in Paris at the same time with Heine, a man of stern, uncompromising partisan¬ ship and bitter humor. Without justifying Heine’s produc¬ tion of this book, we see excuses for him which should temper the condemnation passed on it. There was a radical opposition of nature between him and Borne; to use his own distinction, Heine is a Hellene — sensuous, realistic, exquisitely alive to the beautiful, while Borne was a Nazarene — ascetic, spirit¬ ualistic, despising the pure artist as destitute of earnestness. Heine has too keen a perception of practical absurdities and damaging exaggerations ever to become a thoroughgoing partisan; and with a love of freedom, a faith in the ultimate triumph of democratic principles, of which we see no just reason to doubt the genuineness and consistency, he has been unable to satisfy more zealous and one-sided liberals by giving his adhesion to their views and measures, or hy adopting a denunciatory tone against those in the opposite ranks. Borne could not forgive what he regarded as Heine’s epicurean in¬ difference and artistic dalliance, and he at length gave vent to his antipathy in savage attacks on him through the press, accusing him of utterly lacking character and principle, and even of writing under the influence of venal motives. To these attacks Heine remained absolutely mute — from con¬ tempt, according to his own account; but the retort, which he resolutely refrained from making during Borne’s life, comes in this volume published after his death, Avith the concentrated force of long-gathering thunder. The utterly inexcusable part of the book is the caricature of Borne’s friend, Madame Wohl, and the scurrilous insinuations concerning Borne’s do¬ mestic life. It is said, we know not with how much truth, 88 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. that Heine had to answer for these in a duel with Madame Wohl’s husband, and that, after receiving a serious wound, he promised to withdraw the offensive matter from a future edition. That edition, however, has not been called for. Whatever else we may think of the book, it'is impossible to deny its transcendent talent, the dramatic vigor with which Borne is made present to us, the critical acumen with which he is characterized, and the wonderful play of wit, pathos, and thought which runs through the whole. But we will let Heine speak for himself, and first we will give part of his graphic description of the way in which Borne’s mind and manners grated on his taste : — “ To the disgust which, in intercourse with Borne, I was in danger of feeling towards those who surrounded him, was added the annoy¬ ance I felt from his perpetual talk about politics. Nothing but polit¬ ical argument, and again political argument, even at table, where he managed to hunt me out. At dinner, when I so gladly forget all the vexations of the world, he spoiled the best dishes for me by his patri¬ otic gall, which he poured as a bitter sauce over everything. Calfs feet a la maitre dhdtel , then my innocent bonne bouche , he completely spoiled for me by Job’s tidings from Germany, which he scraped to¬ gether out of the most unreliable newspapers. And then his accursed remarks, which spoiled one’s appetite! . . . This was a sort of table- talk which did not greatly exhilarate me, and I avenged myself by affecting an excessive, almost impassioned indifference for the object of Borne’s enthusiasm. For example, Borne was indignant that im¬ mediately on my arrival in Paris, I had nothing better to do than to write for German papers a long account of the Exhibition of Pictures. I omit all discussion as to whether that interest in Art which induced me to undertake this work was so utterly irreconcilable with the Rev¬ olutionary interests of the day: but Borne saw in it a proof of my indifference towards the sacred cause of humanity, and I could in my turn spoil the taste of his patriotic sauerkraut for him by talking all dinner-time of nothing but pictures, of Robert’s ‘ Reapers,’ Horace Vernet’s ‘Judith,’ and Scheffer’s ‘Faust.’ . . . That I never thought it worth wfiile to discuss my political principles with him it is needless to say ; and once when he declared that he had found a contradiction in my writings, I satisfied myself with the ironical answer, ‘You are mistaken, mon cher; such contradictions never occur in my works, for GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 89 always before I begin to write, I read over the statement of my polit¬ ical principles in my previous writings, that I may not contradict myself, and that no one may be able to reproach me with apostasy from my liberal principles.’” And here is liis own account of the spirit in which the book was written : — “ I was never Borne’s friend, nor was I ever his enemy. The dis¬ pleasure which he could often excite in me was never very important, and he atoned for it sufficiently by the cold silence which I opposed to all his accusations and raillery. While he lived I wrote not a line against him, I never thought about him, I ignored him completely; and that enraged him beyond measure. If I now speak of him, I do so neither out of enthusiasm nor out of uneasiness; I am conscious of the coolest impartiality. I write here neither an apology nor a critique; and, as in painting the man I go on my own observation, the image I present of him ought perhaps to be regarded as a real portrait. And such a monument is due to him — to the great wrestler who, in the arena of our political games, wrestled so courageously, and earned, if not the laurel, certainly the crown of oak-leaves. I give an image with his true features, without idealization—the more like him, the mure honorable for his memory. He was neither a genius nor a hero ; he was no Olympian god. He was a man, a denizen of this earth ; he was a good writer and a great patriot. . . . Beautiful, delicious peace, which I feel at this moment in the depths of my soul! Thou re- wardest me sufficiently for everything I have done and for everything I have despised. ... I shall defend myself neither from the reproach of indifference nor from the suspicion of venality. I have for years, during the life of the insinuator, held such self-justification unworthy of me ; now even decency demands silence. That would be a frightful spectacle, —- polemics between Death and Exile ! Dost thou stretch out to me a beseeching hand from the grave? Without rancor I reach mine towards thee. . . . See how noble it is, and pure ! It was never soiled by pressing the hands of the mob, any more than by the impure' gold of the people’s enemy. In reality thou hast never injured me. . . . In all thy insinuations there is not a louis d’or’s worth of truth.” In one of these years Heine was married, and, in deference' to the sentiments of his wife, married according to the rites 90 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. of the Catholic Church. On this fact busy rumor afterwards founded the story of his conversion to Catholicism, and could of course name the day and the spot on which he abjured Protestantism. In his “ Gestandnisse ” Heine publishes a denial of this rumor; less, he says, for the sake of depriving the Catholics of the solace they may derive from their belief in a new convert, than in order to cut off from another party the more spiteful satisfaction of bewailing his instability: — “ That statement of time and place was entirely correct. I was actually on the specified day in the specified church, which was, more¬ over, a Jesuit church, namely St. Sulpice; and I then went through a religious act. But this act was no odious abjuration, hut a very in¬ nocent conjugation ; that is to say, my marriage, already performed according to the civil law, there received the ecclesiastical consecration, because my wife, whose family are stanch Catholics, would not have thought her marriage sacred enough without such a ceremony. And I would on no account cause this beloved being any uneasiness or disturbance in her religious views .’ 7 For sixteen years, from 1831 to 1847, Heine lived that rapid, concentrated life which is known only in Paris; but then, alas ! stole on the “ days of darkness,” and they were to be many. In 1847 he felt the approach of the terrible spinal disease which has for seven years chained him to his bed in acute suffering. The last time he went out of doors, he tells us, was in May, 1848 : — “With, difficulty I dragged myself to the Louvre, and I almost sank down as I entered the magnificent hall where the ever-blessed goddess of beauty, our beloved Lady of Milo, stands on her pedestal. At her feet I lay long, and wept so bitterly that a stone must have pitied me. The goddess looked compassionately on me, but at the same time dis¬ consolately, as if she would say : Dost thou not see, then, that I have no arms, and thus cannot help thee % ” Since 1848, then, this pmet, whom the lovely objects of nature have always “haunted like a passion,” has not de¬ scended from the second story of a Parisian house; this man of hungry intellect has been shut out from all direct observa- GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 91 ’tion of life, all contact with society, except such as is de¬ rived from visitors to his sick-room. The terrible nervous disease has affected his eyes; the sight of one is utterly gone, and he can only raise the lid of the other by lifting it with his finger. Opium alone is the beneficent genius that stills his pain. We hardly know whether to call it an alleviation or an intensification of the torture that Heine retains his mental vigor, his poetic imagination, and his incisive wit; for if this intellectual activity fills up a blank, it widens the sphere of suffering. His brother described him in 1851 as still, in moments when the hand of pain was not too heavy on him, the same Heinrich Heine, poet and satirist by turns. In such moments, he would narrate the strangest things in the gravest manner. But when he came to an end, he would roguishly lift up the lid of his right eye with his finger, to see the impression he had produced; and if his audience had been listening with a serious face, he would break into Ho¬ meric laughter. We have other proof than personal testimony, that Heine’s disease allows his genius to retain much of its energy, in the “Eomanzero,” a volume of poems published in 1851, and written chiefly during the three first years of his illness; and in the first volume of the “Vermischte Schrif- ten,” also the product of recent years. Very plaintive is the poet’s own description of his condition, in the epilogue to the “ Romanzero : ” — u Do I really exist*? My body is so shrunken that I am hardly anything but a voice; and my bed reminds me of the singing grave of the magician Merlin, which lies in the forest of Brozeliand, in Brittany, under tall oaks whose tops soar like green flames towards heaven. Alas! I envy thee those trees and the fresh breeze that moves their branches, brother Merlin, for no green leaf rustles about my mattress- grave in Paris, where early and late I hear nothing but the rolling of vehicles, hammering, quarrelling, and piano-strumming. A grave without repose, death without the privileges of the dead, who have no debts to pay, and need write neither letters nor books — that is a pite¬ ous condition. Long ago the measure has been taken for my coffin' and for my necrology, but I die so slowly, that the process is tedious ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. qo for me as well as my friends. But patience ) everything has an end. You will one day find the booth closed where the puppet-show of my humor has so often delighted you.” As early as 1850 it was rumored, that since Heine’s illness a change had taken place in his religious views ; and as rumor seldom stops short of extremes, it was soon said that he had become a thorough pietist, Catholics and Protestants by turns claiming him as a convert. Such a change in so uncompro¬ mising an iconoclast, in a man who had been so zealous in his negations as Heine, naturally excited considerable sensation in the camp he was supposed to have quitted, as well as in that he was supposed to have joined. In the second volume of the “ Salon ” and in the “ Romantische Schule,” written in 1834 and 1835, the doctrine of Pantheism is dwelt on with a fervor and unmixed seriousness which show that Pantheism was then an animating faith to Heine, and he attacks what he considers the false spiritualism and asceticism of Christi¬ anity as the enemy of true beauty in Art, and of social well¬ being. How, however, it was said that Heine had recanted all his heresies; but from the fact that visitors to his sick¬ room brought away very various impressions as to his actual religious views, it seemed probable that his love of mystifica¬ tion had found a tempting opportunity for exercise on this subject, and that, as one of his friends said, he was not in¬ clined to pour out unmixed wine to those who asked for a sample out of mere curiosity. At length, in the epilogue to the “ Romanzero,” dated 1851, there appeared, amidst much mystifying banter, a declaration that he had embraced The¬ ism and the belief in a future life, and what chiefly lent an air of seriousness and reliability to this affirmation, was the fact that he took care to accompany it with certain negations : — u As concerns myself, I can boast of no particular progress in poli¬ tics ; I adhered (after 1848) to the same democratic principles which had the homage of my youth, and for which I have ever since glowed with increasing fervor. In theology, on the contrary, I must accuse GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 93 myself of retrogression, since, as I have already confessed, I returned to the old superstition — to a personal God. This fact is, once for all, not to he stilled, as many enlightened and well-meaning friends would fain have had it. But I must expressly contradict the report that my retrograde movement has carried me as far as to the threshold of a Church, and that I have even been received into her lap. No : my religious convictions and views have remained free from any tincture of ecclesiasticism.; no chiming of bells has allured me, no altar-candles have dazzled me. I have dallied with no dogmas, aud have not ut¬ terly renounced my reason.” This sounds like a serious statement. But what shall we say to a convert who plays with his newly acquired belief in a future life, as Heine does in the very next page ? He says to his reader : — “Console thyself; we shall meet again in a better world, where I also mean to write thee better books. I take for granted that my health will there be improved, and that Swedenborg has not deceived me. He relates, namely, with great confidence, that we shall peace¬ fully carry on our old occupations in the other world, just as we have done in this; that we shall there preserve our individuality unaltered, and that death will produce no particular change in our organic devel¬ opment. Swedenborg is a thoroughly honorable fellow, and quite worthy of credit in what he tells us about the other world, where he saw with his own eyes the persons who had played a great part on our earth. Most of them, he says, remained unchanged, and busied them¬ selves with the same things as formerly; they remained stationary, were old-fashioned, rococo — which now and then produced a ludicrous effect. For example, our dear Dr. Martin Luther kept fast by his doc¬ trine of Grace, about which he had for three hundred years daily writ¬ ten down the same mouldy arguments; just in the same way as the late Baron Ekstein, who during twenty years printed in the u Alle- meine Zeitung” one and the same article, perpetually chewing over again the old cud of Jesuitical doctrine. But, as we have said, all per¬ sons who once figured here below were not found by Swedenborg in such a state of fossil immutability; many had considerably developed their character, both for good and evil, in the other world, and this gave rise to some siugular results. Some who had been heroes and saints on earth* had there sunk into scamps and good-for-nothings; and there were 94 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. examples, too, of a contrary transformation. For instance, the fames of self-conceit mounted to Saint Anthony’s head when he learned what immense veneration and adoration had been paid to him by all Chris¬ tendom ; and he who here below withstood the most terrible tempta¬ tions, was now quite an impertinent rascal and dissolute gallows-bird, who vied with his pig in rolling himself in the mud. The chaste Susanna, from having been excessively vain of her virtue, which she thought indomitable, came to a shameful fall, and she who once so gloriously resisted the two old men, was a victim to the seductions of the young Absalom, the son of David. On the contrary, Lot’s daughters had in the lapse of time become very virtuous, and passed in the other world for models of propriety ) the old man, alas ! had stuck to the wine-flask.” In liis “ Gestandnisse ” the retraction of former opinions and profession of Theism are renewed, but in a strain of irony that repels our sympathy and baffles our psychology. Yet what strange, deep pathos is mingled with the audacity of the following passage : — u What avails it me, that enthusiastic youths and maidens crown my marble bust with laurel, when the withered hands of an aged nurse are pressing Spanish flies behind my ears ? What avails it me, that all the roses of Shiraz glow and waft incense for me ? Alas ! Shiraz is two thousand miles from the Rue d’Amsterdam, where, in the weari¬ some loneliness of my sick-room, I get no scent, except it be, perhaps, the perfume of warmed towels. Alas ! God’s satire weighs heavily on me. The great Author of the universe, the Aristophanes of Heaven, was bent on demonstrating, with crushing force, to me, the little, earthly, German Aristophanes, how my wittiest sarcasms are only piti¬ ful attempts at jesting in comparison with Liis, and how miserably I am beneath him in humor, in colossal mockery.” For our own part, we regard the paradoxical irreverence with which Heine professes his theoretical reverence as patho¬ logical, as the diseased exhibition of a predominant tendency, urged into anomalous action by the pressure of pain and men¬ tal privation, as the delirium of wit starved of its proper nourishment. It is not for us to condemn, who have never had the same burden laid on us ; it is not for pygmies at GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 95 their ease to criticise the writhings of the Titan chained to the rock. On one other point we must touch before quitting Heine’s personal history. There is a standing accusation against him, in some quarters, of wanting political principle, of wishing to denationalize himself, and of indulging in insults against his native country. Whatever ground may exist for these accu¬ sations, that ground is not, so far as we see, to be found in his writings. He may not have much faith in German revo¬ lutions and revolutionists; experience, in his case as in that of others, may have thrown his millennial anticipations into more distant perspective; but we see no evidence that he has ever swerved from his attachment to the yjrinciples of freedom, or written anything which to a philosophic mind is incompati¬ ble with true patriotism. He has expressly denied the report that he wished to become naturalized in France ; and his yearn¬ ing towards his native land and the accents of his native lan¬ guage is expressed with a pathos the more reliable from the fact that he is sparing in such effusions. W r e do not see why Heine’s satire of the blunders and foibles of his fellow- countrymen should be denounced as the crime of lese-patrie , any more than the political caricatures of any other satirist. The real offences of Heine are his occasional coarseness and. his unscrupulous personalities, which are reprehensible, not because they are directed against his fellow-countrymen, but because they are personalities. That these offences have their precedents in men whose memory the world delights to honor does not remove their turpitude, but it is a fact which should modify our condemnation in a particular case ; unless, indeed, we are to deliver our judgments on a principle of compensation, making up for our indulgence in one direc¬ tion by our severity in another. On this ground of coarse¬ ness and personality, a true bill may be found against Heine; not , we think, on the ground that he has laughed at what is laughable in his compatriots. Here is a speci¬ men of the satire under which we suppose German patriots wince : — 95 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. u Rhenish Bavaria was to he the starting-point of the Germau Rev¬ olution. Zweibrucken was the Bethlehem in which the infant Saviour —Freedom — lay in the cradle, and gave whimpering promise of re¬ deeming the world. Near his cradle bellowed many an ox, who after¬ wards, when his horns were reckoned on, showed himself a very harmless brute. It was confidently believed that the German Revolu¬ tion would begin in Zweibrucken, and everything was there ripe for an outbreak. But, as has been hinted, the tender-heartedness of some persons frustrated that illegal undertaking. For example, among the Bipontine conspirators there was a tremendous braggart, who was always loudest in his rage, who boiled over with the hatred of tyranny; and this man was fixed on to strike the first blow, by cutting down a sentinel who kept an important post. . . . 1 What! 7 cried the man, when this order was given him — 1 What! — me ! Can you expect so horrible, so bloodthirsty an act of me? I — /, kill an innocent sentinel? I, who am the father of a family ! And this sentinel is perhaps also father of a family. One father of a family kill another father of a family? Yes! Kill — murder! 77 ’ In political matters, Heine, like all men whose intellect and taste predominate too far over their impulses to allow of their becoming partisans, is offensive alike to the aristocrat and the democrat. By the one he is denounced as a man who holds incendiary principles; by the other as a half¬ hearted “ trimmer.” He has no sympathy, as he says, with “ that vague, barren pathos, that useless effervescence of en¬ thusiasm, which plunges, with the spirit of a martyr, into an ocean of generalities, and which always reminds me of the American sailor, who had so fervent an enthusiasm for General Jackson, that he at last sprang from the top of a mast into the sea, crying, ‘I die for General Jackson !’ 77 u But thou liest, Brutus, thou best, Cassius, and thou, too, best, Asinius, in maintaining that my ridicule attacks those ideas which are the precious acquisition of Humanity, and for which I myself have so striven and suffered. No! for the very reason that those ideas con¬ stantly hover before the poet in glorious splendor and majesty, he is the more irresistibly overcome by laughter when he sees how rudely, awkwardly, and clumsily those ideas are seized and mirrored in the contracted minds of contemporaries. . . . There are mirrors which GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 97 have so rough a surface that even an Apollo reflected in them becomes a caricature and excites our laughter. But we laugh then only at the caricature , not at the god. v For the rest, why should we demand of Heine that he should be a hero, a patriot, a solemn prophet, any more than we should demand of a gazelle that it should draw well in harness? Nature has not made him of her sterner stuff — not of iron and adamant, but of pollen of flowers, the juice of the grape, and Puck’s mischievous brain, plenteously mixing also the dews of kindly affection and the gold-dust of noble thoughts. It is, after all, a tribute which his enemies pay him when they utter their bitterest dictum, namely, that he is “ nur Dichter ” — only a poet. Let us accept this point of view for the present, and, leaving all consideration of him as a man, look at him simply as a poet and literary artist. Heine is essentially a lyric poet. The finest products of his genius are “ Short swallow-flights of song, that dip Their wings in tears, and skim away; ” and they are so emphatically songs that, in reading them, we feel as if each must have a twin melody born in the same moment and by the same inspiration. Heine is too impres¬ sible and mercurial for any sustained production ; even in his short lyrics his tears sometimes pass into laughter, and his laughter into tears; and his longer poems, u Atta Troll ” and “ Deutschland,” are full of Ariosto-like transitions. His song has a wide compass of notes; he can take us to the shores of the Northern Sea and thrill us by the sombre sub¬ limity of his pictures and dreamy fancies; he can draw forth our tears by the voice he gives to our own sorrows, or to the sorrows of “ Poor Peter; ” he can throw a cold shudder over us by a mysterious legend, a ghost story, or a still more ghastly rendering of hard reality ; he can charm us by a quiet idyl, shake us with laughter at his overflowing fun, or give us a piquant sensation of surprise by the ingenuity of his. transitions from the lofty to the ludicrous. Tills last power 7 VOL. IX. 98 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. is not 7 indeed, essentially poetical; but only a poet can use it with the same success as Heine, for only a poet can poise our emotion and expectation at such a height as to give effect to the sudden fall. Heine’s greatest power as a poet lies in his simple pathos, in the ever-varied but always natural expres¬ sion he has given to the tender emotions. We may perhaps indicate this phase of his genius by referring to Wordsworth’s beautiful little poem, “She dwelt among the untrodden ways ; ” the conclusion — “ She dwelt alone, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be ; But she is in her grave, and, oh! The difference to me ” — is entirely in Heine’s manner; and so is Tennyson’s poem of a dozen lines, called “ Circumstance.” Both these poems have Heine’s pregnant simplicity. But, lest this comparison should mislead, we must say that there is no general resem¬ blance between either Wordsworth, or Tennyson, and Heine. Their greatest qualities lie quite away from the light, del¬ icate lucidity, the easy, rippling music, of Heine’s style. The distinctive charm of his lyrics may best be seen by com¬ paring them with Goethe’s. Both have the same masterly, finished simplicity and rhythmic grace; but there is more thought mingled with Goethe’s feeling. His lyrical genius is a vessel that draws more water than Heine’s, and, though it seems to glide along with equal ease, we have a sense of greater weight and force accompanying the grace of its movement. But, for this very reason, Heine touches our hearts more strongly; his songs are all music and feeling j they are like birds, that not only enchant us with their delicious notes, but nestle against us with their soft breasts, and make us feel the' agitated beating of their hearts. He indicates a whole sad history in a single quatrain; there is not an image in it, not a thought; but it is beautiful, simple, and perfect as a “ big round tear; ” it is pure feeling breathed in pure music : — GERMAN WIT : HEINRICH HEINE. 99 “ Anfangs wollt’ ich fast verzagen Und ich glaubt’ ich trug es nie, Und ich hab’ es doch getragen, — Aber fragt mich nur nicht, wie.” 1 He excels equally in the more imaginative expression of feeling; he represents it by a brief image, like a finely cut cameo; he expands it into a mysterious dream, or dramatizes it in a little story, half-ballad, half-idyl; and in all these forms his art is so perfect that we never have a sense of ar¬ tificiality or of unsuccessful effort, but all seems to have developed itself by the same beautiful necessity that brings forth vine-leaves and grapes and the natural curls of child¬ hood. Of Heine’s humorous poetry, “ Deutschland ” is the most charming specimen — charming, especially, because its wit and humor grow out of a rich loam of thought. “ Atta Troll ” is more original, more various, more fantastic ; but it is too great a strain on the imagination to be a general favorite. We have said that feeling is the element in which Heine’s poetic genius habitually floats; but he can occasionally soar to a higher region, and impart deep significance to pict¬ uresque symbolism ; he can flash a sublime thought over the past and into the future; he can pour forth a lofty strain of hope or indignation. Few could forget, after once hearing them, the stanzas at the close of “ Deutschland,” in which he warns the King of Prussia not to incur the irredeemable hell which the injured poet can create for him, the singing flames of a Dante’s terza rima ! “ Kennst da die Hblle des Dante nicht, Die schrecklichen Terzetten ? Wen da der Dichter hineingesperrt Den kann kein Gott mehr retten. “ Kein Gott, kein Heiland, erldst ihn je ' Aus diesen singenden flam men ! Nimm dich in Acht, das wir dich nicht Zu solcher Hblle verdammen.” 2 1 At first I was almost in despair, and I thought I could never bear it; and yet I have borne it, — only do not ask me how ? 2 It is not fair to the English reader to indulge in German quotations, but in our opinion poetical translations are usually worse than valueless. 100 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. As a prosaist, Heine is, in one point of view, even more distinguished than as a poet. The German language easily lends itself to all the purposes of poetry; like the ladies of the Middle Ages, it is gracious and compliant to the Trouba¬ dours. But as these same ladies were often crusty and re¬ pulsive to their unmusical mates, so the German language generally appears awkward and unmanageable in the hands of prose-writers. Indeed, the number of really fine German pro¬ saists before Heine would hardly have exceeded the numerat¬ ing powers of a New Hollander, who can count three and no more. Persons the most familiar with German prose testify that there is an extra fatigue in reading it, just as we feel an extra fatigue from our walk when it takes us over ploughed clay. But in Heine’s hands German prose, usually so heavy, so clumsy, so dull, becomes like clay in the hands of the chem¬ ist, compact, metallic, brilliant; it is German in an allotropic condition. No dreary labyrinthine sentences in which you find “ no end in wandering mazes lost; ” no chains of adjec¬ tives in linked harshness long drawn out; no digressions thrown in as parentheses; but crystalline definiteness and clearness, fine and varied rhythm, and all that delicate preci¬ sion, all those felicities of word and cadence, which belong to the highest order of prose. And Heine has proved — what Madame de Stael seems to have doubted — that it is possible to be witty in German; indeed, in reading him, you might imagine that German was pre-eminently the language of wit, so flexible, so subtle, so piquant does it become under his management. Fie is far more an artist in prose than Goethe. Fie has not the breadth and repose, and the calm development which belong to Goethe’s style, for they are foreign to his mental character ; but he excels Goethe in susceptibility to the manifold qualities of prose, and in mastery over its For those who think differently, however, we may mention that Mr. Stores Smith has published a modest little book, containing “ Selections from the Poetry of Heinrich Heine,” and that a meritorious (American) translation of Heine’s complete works, by Charles Leland, is now appearing in shilling numbers. GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 101 effects. Heine is full of variety, of light and shadow; he alternates between epigrammatic pith, imaginative grace, sly allusion, and daring piquancy; and athwart all these there runs a vein of sadness, tenderness, and grandeur, which reveals the poet. He continually throws out those finely chiselled sayings which stamp themselves on the memory, and become familiar by quotation. For example : “ The people have time enough, they are immortal; kings only are mortal.” — “ Wherever a great soul utters its thoughts, there is Gol¬ gotha.” — “ Nature wanted to see how she looked, and she created Goethe.’’ — “ Only the man who has known bodily suffering is truly a man ; his limbs have their Passion history, they are spiritualized.” He calls Rubens “ this Flemish Ti¬ tan, the wings of whose genius were so strong that he soared as high as the sun, in spite of the hundred-weight of Dutch cheeses that hung on his legs.” Speaking of Borne’s dislike to the calm creations of the true artist, he says : u Fie was like a child which, insensible to the glowing significance of a Greek statue, only touches the marble and complains of cold.” The most poetic and specifically humorous of Heine’s prose writings are the “ Reisebilder.” The comparison with Sterne is inevitable here; but Heine does not suffer from it, for if he falls below Sterne in raciness of humor, he is far above him in poetic sensibility and in reach and variety of thought. Heine’s humor is never persistent, it never flows on long in easy gayety and drollery; where it is not swelled by the tide of poetic feeling, it is continually dashing down the precipice of a witticism. It is not broad and unctuous; it is aerial and sprite-like, a momentary resting-place between his poetry and his wit. In the “ Reisebilder ” he runs through the whole gamut of his powers, and gives us every hue of thought, from the wildly droll and fantastic to the sombre and the terrible. Here is a passage almost Dantesque in conception : — “Alas! one ought in truth to write against no one in this world: Each of us is sick enough in this great lazaretto, and many a poleini- 102 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. cal writing reminds me involuntarily of a revolting quarrel, in a little hospital at Cracow, of which I chanced to he a witness, and where it was horrible to hear liow the patients mockingly reproached each other with their infirmities: how one who was wasted by consumption jeered at another who was bloated by dropsy; how one laughed at another’s cancer in the nose, and this one again at his neighbor’s locked jaw or squint; until at last the delirious fever-patient sprang out of bed and tore away the coverings from the wounded bodies of his companions, and nothing was to be seen but hideous misery and mutilation.” And how line is the transition in the very next chapter, where, after quoting the Homeric description of the feasting gods, he says : — “Then suddenly approached, panting, a pale Jew, with drops of blood on his brow, with a crown of thorns on his head, and a great cross laid on his shoulders; and he threw the cross on the high table of the gods, so that the golden cups tottered, and the gods became dumb and pale, and grew ever paler, till they at last melted away into vapor.” The richest specimens of Heine’s wit are perhaps to be found in the works which have appeared since the “ Reise- bilder.” The years, if they have intensified his satirical bit¬ terness, have also given his wit a finer edge and polish. His sarcasms are so subtly prepared and so slyly allusive, that they may often escape readers whose sense of wit is not very acute; but for those who delight in the subtle and delicate flavors of style, there can hardly be any wit more irresistible than Heine’s. We may measure its force by the degree in which it has subdued the German language to its purposes, and made that language brilliant in spite of a long hereditary transmission of dulness. As one of the most harmless exam¬ ples of his satire, take this on a man who has certainly had his share of adulation : — u Assuredly it is far from my purpose to depreciate M. Victor Cousin. The titles of this celebrated philosopher even lay me under an obliga¬ tion to praise him. He belongs to that living pantheon of France, which we call the peerage, and his intelligent legs rest on the velvet GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 103 benches of the Luxembourg. I must indeed sternly repress all private feelings which might seduce me into an excessive enthusiasm. Other¬ wise I might bo suspected of servility ; for M. Cousin is very influen¬ tial in the state by means of his position and his tongue. This consideration might even move me to speak of his faults as frankly as of his virtues. Will he himself disapprove of this? Assuredly not. I know that we cannot do higher honor to great minds than when we throw as strong a light on their demerits as on their merits. When we sing the praises of a Hercules, we must also mention that he once laid aside the lion’s skin and sat down to the distaff: what then ? he remains notwithstanding a Hercules ! So when we relate similar cir¬ cumstances concerning M. Cousin, we must nevertheless add, with dis¬ criminating eulogy : M. Cousin , if he has sometimes sat twaddling at the distaff , has never laid aside the lion’s skin. ... It is true that, having been suspected of demagogy, he spent some time in a German prison, just as Lafayette and Richard Cceur de Lion. But that M. Cousin there in his leisure hours studied Kant’s i Critique of Pure Reason ’ is to be doubted on three grounds. First, this book is written in Ger¬ man. Secondly, in order to read this book, a man must understand German. Thirdly, M. Cousin does not understand German. ... I fear I am passing unawares from the sweet waters of praise into the bitter ocean of blame. Yes, on one account I cannot refrain from bit¬ terly blaming M. Cousin, — namely, that he who loves truth far more than he loves Plato and Tenneman, is unjust to himself when he wants to persuade us that he has borrowed something from the philosophy of Schelling arid Hegel. Against this self-accusation, I must take M. Cousin under my protection. On my word and conscience, this honorable man has not stolen a jot from Schelling and Hegel, and if he brought home anything of theirs, it was merely their friendship. That does honor to his heart. But there are many instances of such false self-accusation in psychology. I knew a man who declared that he had stolen silver spoons at the king’s table; and yet we all knew that the poor devil had never been presented at court, and accused himself of stealing these spoons to make us believe that he had been a guest at the palace. No ! In German philosophy M. Cousin has always kept the sixth commandment; here he has never pocketed a single idea, not so much as a salt-spoon of an idea. All witnesses agree in attesting that in this respect M. Cousin is honor itself. ... I prophesy to you that the renown of M. Cousin, like the French Revolution, will go round the world ! I hear some one wickedly add : Undeniably the renown of 104 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. M. Cousin is going round the world, and it has already taken its de¬ parture from France The following “ symbolical myth ” about Louis Philippe is very characteristic of Heine’s manner: — 11 1 remember very well that immediately on my arrival [in Paris] I hastened to the Palais Royal to see Louis Philippe. The friend who conducted me told me that the king now appeared on the terrace only at stated hours, but that formerly he was to be seen at any time for five francs. 1 For five francs ! ’ I cried with amazement; 1 does he then show himself for money ?’ ‘No; but he is shown for money, and it happens in this way : There is a society of claqueurs , marchands de contremarques, and such riff-raff, who offered every foreigner to show him the king for five francs; if he would give ten francs, he might see the king raise his eyes to heaven, and lay his hand protestingly on his heart; if he would give twenty francs, the king would sing the Mar¬ seillaise. If the foreigner gave five francs, they raised a loud cheering under the king’s windows, and His Majesty appeared on the terrace, bowed, and retired. If ten francs, they shouted still louder, and gestic¬ ulated as if they had been possessed, when the king appeared, who then, as a sign of silent emotion, raised his eyes to heaven, and laid his hand on his heart. English visitors, however, would sometimes spend as much as twenty francs, and then the enthusiasm mounted to the highest pitch; no sooner did the king appear on the terrace, than the Marseillaise was struck up and roared out frightfully, until Louis Philippe, perhaps only for the sake of putting an end to the singing, bowed, laid his hand on his heart, and joined in the Marseillaise. Whether, as is asserted, he beat time with his foot, I cannot say.’ ” One more quotation and it must be our last: — “Oh the women ! We must forgive them much, for they love much, and many. Their hate is properly only love turned inside out. Some¬ times they attribute some delinquency to us, because they think they can in this way gratify another man. When they' write, they have always one eye on the paper and the other on a man ; and this is true of all authoresses, except the Countess Hahn-Hahu, who has only one eye.” EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. CI7MMING. IVEN, a man with moderate intellect, a moral standard not higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence - and great glibness of speech, what is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most easily attain power and reputation in English society ? Where is that Goshen of mediocrity in which a smattering of science and learning will pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will be accepted as wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as God-given piety ? Let such a man be¬ come an evangelical preacher; he will then find it possible to reconcile small ability with great ambition, superficial knowledge with the prestige of erudition, a middling morale with a high reputation for sanctity. Let him shun practical extremes and be ultra only in what is purely theoretic: let him be stringent on predestination, but latitudinarian on fast¬ ing ; unflinching in insisting on the Eternity of punishment, but diffident of curtailing the substantial comforts of Time; ardent and imaginative on the pre-millennial advent of Christ, but cold and cautious towards every other infringement of the status quo. Let him fish for souls, not with the bait of in¬ convenient singularity, but with the drag-net of comfortable conformity. Let him be hard and literal in his interpretation only when he wants to hurl texts at the heads of unbelievers and adversaries ; but when the letter of the Scriptures presses too closely on the genteel Christianity of the nineteenth cen¬ tury, let him use his spiritualizing alembic and disperse it into impalpable ether. Let him preach less of Christ than of Antichrist; let him be less definite in showing what sin is 106 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. than in showing who is the Man of Sin, less expansive on the blessedness of faith than on the accursedness of infidelity. Above all, let him set up as an interpreter of prophecy, and rival Moore’s Almanack in the prediction of political events, tickling the interest of hearers who are but moderately spir¬ itual by showing how the Holy Spirit has dictated problems and charades for their benefit, and how, if they are ingenious enough to solve these, they may have their Christian graces nourished by learning precisely to whom they may point as the “horn that had eyes,” “the lying prophet,” and the “un¬ clean spirits.” In this way he will draw men to him by the strong cords of their passions, made reason-proof by being baptized with the name of piety. In this way he may gain a metropolitan pulpit; the avenues to his church will be as crowded as the passages to the opera; he has but to print his prophetic sermons and bind them in lilac and gold, and they will adorn the drawing-room table of all evangelical ladies, who will regard as a sort of pious “ light reading ” the dem¬ onstration that the prophecy of the locusts whose sting is in their tail is fulfilled in the fact of the Turkish commander’s having taken a horse’s tail for his standard, and that the French are the very frogs predicted in the Revelations. Pleasant to the clerical flesh under such circumstances is the arrival of Sunday ! Somewhat at a disadvantage during the week, in the presence of working-day interests and lay splendors, on Sunday the preacher becomes the cynosure of a thousand eyes, and predominates at once over the Amphit¬ ryon with whom he dines, and the most captious member of his church or vestry. He has an immense advantage over all other public speakers. The platform orator is subject to the criticism of hisses and groans. Counsel for the plaintiff expects the retort of counsel for the defendant. The honor¬ able gentleman on one side of the House is liable to have his facts and figures shown up by his honorable friend on th6 opposite side. Even the scientific or literary lecturer, if he is dull or incompetent, may see the best part of his audience quietly slip out one by one. But the preacher is completely EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. CITMMING. 107 master of the situation: no one may hiss, no one may depart. Like the writer of imaginary conversations, he may put what imbecilities he pleases into the mouths of his antagonists, and swell with triumph when he has refuted them. He may riot in gratuitous assertions, confident that no man will con¬ tradict him; he may exercise perfect free-will in logic, and invent illustrative experience; he may give an evangelical edition of history with the inconvenient facts omitted; — all this he may do with impunity, certain that those of his hear¬ ers who are not sympathizing are not listening. For the Press has no band of critics who go the round of the churches and chapels, and are on the watch for a slip or defect in the preacher, to make a “ feature ” in their article; the clergy are, practically, the most irresponsible of all talkers. For this reason, at least, it is well that they do not always allow their discourses to be merely fugitive, but are often induced to fix them in that black and white in which they are open to the criticism of any man who has the courage and patience to treat them with thorough freedom of speech and pen. It is because we think this criticism of clerical teaching desirable for the public good, that we devote some pages to Dr. Gumming. He is, as every one knows, a preacher of im¬ mense popularity ; and of the numerous publications in which he perpetuates his pulpit labors, all circulate widely, and some, according to their titlepage, have reached the sixteenth thousand. Now, our opinion of these publications is the very opposite of that given by a newspaper eulogist: we do not u believe that the repeated issues of Dr. Cumming’s thoughts are having a beneficial effect on society/’ but the reverse; and hence, little inclined as we are to dwell on his pages, we think it worth while to do so, for the sake of pointing out in them what we believe to be profoundly mistaken and per¬ nicious. Of Dr. Cumming personally we know absolutely nothing; our acquaintance with him is confined to a perusal of his works, our judgment of him is founded solely on the manner in which he has written himself down on his pages, We know neither how he looks nor how he lives. 108 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. We are ignorant whether, like St. Paul, he has a bodily pres¬ ence that is weak and contemptible, or whether his person is as florid and as prone to amplification as his style. For aught we know, he may not only have the gift of prophecy, but may bestow the profits of all his works to feed the poor, and be ready to give his own body to be burned with as much alacrity as he infers the everlasting burning of Roman Catho¬ lics and Puseyites. Out of the pulpit he may be a model of justice, truthfulness, and the love that thinketh no evil; but we are obliged to judge of his charity by the spirit we find in his sermons, and shall only be glad to learn that his prac¬ tice is, in many respects, an amiable non sequitur from his teaching. Dr. Cumming’s mind is evidently not of the pietistic order. There is not the slightest leaning towards mysticism in his Christianity, —- no indication of religious raptures, of delight in God, of spiritual communion with the Father. He is most at home in the forensic view of Justification, and dwells on salvation as a scheme rather than as an experience. He insists on good works as the sign of justifying faith, as labors to be achieved to the glory of God; but he rarely represents them as the spontaneous, necessary outflow of a soul filled with Divine love. He is at home in the external, the polem¬ ical, the historical, the circumstantial, and is only episodi¬ cally devout and practical. The great majority of his published sermons are occupied with argument or philippic against Romanists and unbelievers, with “ vindications ” of the Bible, with the political interpretation of prophecy, or the criticism of public events; and the devout aspiration, or the spiritual and practical exhortation, is tacked to them as a sort of fringe in a hurried sentence or two at the end. He revels in the demonstration that the Pope is the Man of Sin; he is copious on the downfall of the Ottoman Empire ; he ap¬ pears to glow with satisfaction in turning a story which tends to show how he abashed an “ infidel; ” it is a favorite exer¬ cise with him to form conjectures of the process by which the EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. CUMMING. 109 earth is to be burned up, and to picture Dr. Chalmers and Mr. Wilberforce being caught up to meet Christ in the air, while Romanists, Puseyites, and infidels are given over to gnashing of teeth. But of really spiritual joys and sorrows, of the life and death of Christ as a manifestation of love that constrains the soul, of sympathy with that yearning over the lost and erring which made Jesus weep over Jerusalem, and prompted the sublime prayer, “Father, forgive them/’ of the gentler fruits of the Spirit, and the peace of God which passeth understanding,—of all this, we find little trace in Dr. Cumming’s discourses. His style is in perfect correspondence with this habit of mind. Though diffuse, as that of all preachers must be, it has rapidity of movement, perfect clearness, and some apt¬ ness of illustration. He has much of that literary talent which makes a good journalist, — the power of beating out an idea over a large space, and of introducing far-fetched apropos. His writings have, indeed, no high merit: they have no originality or force of thought, no striking felicity of presentation, no depth of emotion. Throughout nine volumes we have alighted on no passage which impressed us as worth extracting, and placing among the “beauties” of evangelical writers, sucli as Robert Hall, Foster the Essayist, or Isaac Taylor. Everywhere there is commonplace clever¬ ness, nowhere a spark of rare thought, of lofty sentiment, or pathetic tenderness. We feel ourselves in company with a voluble retail talker, whose language is exuberant but not exact, and to whom we should never think of referring for precise information or for well-digested thought and expe¬ rience. His argument continually slides into wholesale asser¬ tion and vague declamation, and in his love of ornament he frequently becomes tawdry. For example, he tells us 1 that “ Botany weaves around the cross her amaranthine garlands; and Newton comes from his starry home, Linnaeus from his flowery resting-place, and Werner and Hutton from their sub¬ terranean graves, at the voice of Chalmers, to acknowledge 1 Apoc. Sketches, p. 265. 110 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. that all they learned and elicited in their respective provinces, has only served to show more clearly that Jesus of Nazareth is enthroned on the riches of the universe ; ” — and so prosaic an injunction to his hearers as that they should choose a resi¬ dence within an easy distance of church, is magnificently draped by him as an exhortation to prefer a house “that basks in the sunshine of the countenance of God.” Like all preachers of his class, he is more fertile in imaginative para¬ phrase than in close exposition, and in this way he gives us some remarkable fragments of what we may call the romance of Scripture, filling up the outline of the record with an elab¬ orate coloring quite undreamed of by more literal minds. The serpent, he informs us, said to Eve, “ Can it be so ? Surely you are mistaken, that God hath said you shall die, a creature so fair, so lovely, so beautiful. It is impossible. The laics of nature and physical science tell you that my inter¬ pretation is correct; you shall not die. I can tell you by my own experience as an angel that you shall be as gods, know¬ ing good and evil.” 1 Again, according to Dr. Cumming, Abel had so clear an idea of the Incarnation and Atonement, that when he offered his sacrifice “ he must have said, ‘I feel myself a guilty sinner, and that in myself I cannot meet thee alive; I lay on thine altar this victim, and I shed its blood as my testimony that mine should be shed; and I look for forgiveness and undeserved mercy through Him who is to bruise the serpent’s head, and whose atonement this typi¬ fies.’ ” 2 Indeed, his productions are essentially ephemeral; he is essentially a journalist, who writes sermons instead of leading articles, who, instead of venting diatribes against her Majesty’s Ministers, directs his power of invective against Cardinal Wiseman and the Puseyites, — instead of declaiming on public spirit, perorates on the “glory of God.” We fancy he is called, in the more refined evangelical circles, an “ intel¬ lectual preacher; ” by the plainer sort of Christians, a “ flow¬ ery preacher; ” and we are inclined to think that the more spiritually minded class of believers, who look with greater 1 Apoc. Sketches, p. 294. 2 Occas. Disc., vol. i. p. 23. EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. CUMMING. Ill anxiety for the kingdom of God within them than for the visible advent of Christ in 1864, will be likely to find Dr. Cumming’s declamatory flights and historico-prophetical exer- citations as little better than “ clouts o’ cauld parritch.” Such is our general impression from his writings after an attentive perusal. There are some particular characteristics which we shall consider more closely, but in doing so we must be understood as altogether declining any doctrinal dis¬ cussion. We have no intention to consider the grounds of Dr. Cumming’s dogmatic system, to examine the principles of his prophetic exegesis, or to question his opinion concern¬ ing the little horn, the river Euphrates, or the seven vials. We identify ourselves with no one of the bodies whom he regards it as his special mission to attack; we give our adhe¬ sion neither to Romanism, Puseyism, nor to that anomalous combination of opinions which he introduces to us under the name of Infidelity. It is simply as spectators that we criti¬ cise Dr. Cumming’s mode of warfare; and we concern our¬ selves less with what he holds to be Christian truth than with his manner of enforcing that truth, less with the doc¬ trines he teaches than with the moral spirit and tendencies of his teaching. One of the most striking characteristics of Dr. Cumming’s writings is unscrwpulosity of statement. His motto apparently is, Christianitatem, quocunque modo Christmnitatem ; and the only system he includes under the term Christianity is Cal- vinistic Protestantism. Experience has so long shown that the human brain is a congenial nidus for inconsistent beliefs that we do not pause to inquire how Dr. Cumming, who attrib¬ utes the conversion of the unbelieving to the Divine Spirit, can think it necessary to co-operate with that Spirit by argu¬ mentative white lies. Nor do we for a moment impugn the genuineness of his zeal for Christianity, or the sincerity of his conviction that the doctrines he preaches are necessary to salvation; on the contrary, we regard the flagrant unve¬ racity that we find on his pages as an in direct result of that conviction, — as a result, namely, of the intellectual and 312 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. moral distortion of view which, is inevitably produced by assigning to dogmas, based on a very complex structure of evidence, the place and authority of first truths. A distinct appreciation of the value of evidence — in other words, the intellectual perception of truth — is more closely allied to truthfulness of statement, or the moral quality of veracity, than is generally admitted. There is not a more pernicious fallacy afloat in common parlance than the wide distinction made between intellect and morality. Amiable impulses without intellect man may have in common with dogs and horses; but morality, which is specifically human, is depen¬ dent on the regulation of feeling by intellect. All human beings who can be said to be in any degree moral have their impulses guided, not indeed always by their own intellect, but by the intellect of human beings who have gone before them, and created traditions and associations which have taken the rank of laws. Now, that highest moral habit, the constant preference of truth both theoretically and practi¬ cally, pre-eminently demands the co-operation of the intellect with the impulses; as is indicated by the fact that it is only found in anything like completeness in the highest class of minds. In accordance with this we think it is found that, in proportion as religious sects exalt feeling above intellect, and believe themselves to be guided by direct inspiration rather than by a spontaneous exertion of their faculties, — that is, in proportion as they are removed from rationalism, — their sense of truthfulness is misty and confused. No one can have talked to the more enthusiastic Methodists, and lis¬ tened to their stories of miracles, without perceiving that they require no other passport to a statement than that it accords with their wishes and their general conception of God’s deal¬ ings ; nay, they regard as a symptom of sinful scepticism an inquiry into the evidence for a story which they think un¬ questionably tends to the glory of God, and in retailing such stories, new particulars, further tending to his glory, are “borne in” upon their minds. Now, Dr. Cumming, as we have said, is no enthusiastic pietist: within a certain circle, EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. CUMMING. 113 within the mill of evangelical orthodoxy, his intellect is perpetually at work; but that principle of sophistication which our friends the Methodists derive from the predomi¬ nance of their pietistic feelings, is involved for him in the doctrine of verbal inspiration; what is for them a state of emotion submerging the intellect, is with him a formula im¬ prisoning the intellect, depriving it of its proper function,— the free search for truth — and making it the mere servant- of-all-work to a foregone conclusion. Minds fettered by this doctrine no longer inquire concerning a proposition whether it is attested by sufficient evidence, but whether it accords with Scripture; they do not search for facts, as such, but for facts that will bear out their doctrine. They become accus¬ tomed to reject the more direct evidence in favor of the less direct, and where adverse evidence reaches demonstration they must resort to devices and expedients in order to ex¬ plain away contradiction. It is easy to see that this mental habit blunts not only the perception of truth, but the sense of truthfulness, and that the man whose faith drives him into fallacies treads close upon the precipice of falsehood. We have entered into this digression for the sake of miti¬ gating the inference that is likely to be drawn from that characteristic of Dr. Cumming’s works to 'which we have pointed. Lie is much in the same intellectual condition as that professor of Padua who, in order to disprove Galileo’s discovery of Jupiter’s satellites, urged that as there were only seven metals there could not be more than seven planets, — a mental condition scarcely compatible with candor. And we may well suppose that if the Professor had held the be¬ lief in seven planets, and no more, to be a necessary condi¬ tion of salvation, his mental condition would have been so dazed that even if he had consented to look through Galileo’s telescope, his eyes would have reported in accordance with his inward alarms rather than with the external fact. So long as a belief in propositions is regarded as indispensable to salvation, the pursuit of truth as such is not possible, any more than it is possible for a man who is swimming for his 8 VOL. IX. 114 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. life to make meteorological observations on the storm which threatens to overwhelm him. The sense of alarm and haste, the anxiety for personal safety, which Dr. Gumming insists upon as the proper religious attitude, unmans the nature, and allows no thorough calm-thinking, no truly noble, disin¬ terested feeling. Hence we by no means suspect that the unscrupulosity of statement with which we charge Dr. Gum¬ ming extends beyond the sphere of his theological prejudices ; we do not doubt that, religion apart, he appreciates and prac¬ tises veracity. A grave general accusation must be supported by details; and in adducing those, we purposely select the most obvious cases of misrepresentation, — such as require no argument to expose them, but can be perceived at a glance. Among Dr. Cumming’s numerous books, one of the most notable for un¬ scrupulosity of statement is the u Manual of Christian Evi¬ dences,” written, as he tells us in his preface, not to give the deepest solutions of the difficulties in question, but to fur¬ nish Scripture-Readers, City Missionaries, and Sunday-school Teachers with a “ ready reply ” to sceptical arguments. This announcement that readiness was the chief quality sought for in the solutions here given, modifies our inference from the other qualities which those solutions present; and it is but fair to presume that when the Christian disputant is not in a hurry, Dr. Gumming would recommend replies less ready and more veracious. Here is an example of what in another place 1 he tells his readers is “ change in their pocket, . . . a little ready argument which they can employ, and therewith answer a fool according to his folly.” From the nature of this argumentative small coin, we are inclined to think Dr. Cumming understands answering a fool according to his folly to mean, giving him a foolish answer. We quote from the “ Manual of Christian Evidences,” p. 62 : — u Some of the gods which the heathen worshipped were among the greatest monsters that ever walked the earth. Mercury was a thief ; and because he was an expert thief, he was enrolled among the gods. 1 Lect. on Daniel, p. 6. EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. CUMMING. 115 Bacchus was a mere sensualist and drunkard; and therefore he was enrolled among the gods. Venus was a dissipated and abandoned courtesan; and therefore she was enrolled among the goddesses. Mars was a savage, that gloried in battle and in blood; and therefore he was deified and enrolled among the gods.” Does Dr. Gumming believe the purport of these sentences ? If so, this passage is worth handing down as his theory of the Greek myth, — as a specimen of the astounding ignorance which was possible in a metropolitan preacher, a. d. 1854. And if he does not believe them, — the inference must then be, that he thinks delicate veracity about the ancient Greeks is not a Christian virtue, but only a “ splendid sin ” of the unregenerate. This inference is rendered the more probable by our finding, a little further on, that he is not more scrupulous about the moderns, if they come under his definition of “ Infidels.” But the passage we are about to quote in proof of this has a worse quality than its discrep¬ ancy with fact. Who that has a spark of generous feeling, that rejoices in the presence of good in a fellow-being, has not dwelt with pleasure on the thought that Lord Byron’s unhappy career was ennobled and purified towards its close by a high and sympathetic purpose, by honest and energetic efforts for his fellow-men ? Who has not read with deep emotion those last pathetic lines, beautiful as the after-glow of sunset, in which love and resignation are mingled with something of a melancholy heroism ? Who has not lingered with compassion over the dying scene at Missolonghi, — the sufferer’s inability to make his farewell messages of love in¬ telligible, and the last long hours of silent pain ? Yet for the sake of furnishing his disciples with a “ ready reply,” Dr. Cumming can prevail on himself to inoculate them with a bad-spirited falsity like the following: — “We have one striking exhibition of an infidel 1 s brightest thoughts in some lines written in his dying moments by a man gifted with great genius, capable of prodigious intellectual prowess, but of worthless principle and yet more worthless practices, — I mean the celebrated Lord Byron. He says : — 116 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. ‘ Though gay companions o’er the bowl Dispel awhile the sense of ill, Though pleasure fills the maddening soul. The heart — the heart is lonely still. * Ay, hut to die, and go, alas! Where all have gone and all must go; To be the Nothing that I was, Ere born to life and living woe! i Count o’er the joys thine hours have seen, Count o’er thy days from anguish free. And know, whatever thou hast been, ’T is something better not to be. * Nay, for myself, so dark my fate Through every turn of life hath been, Man and the world so much I hate, I care not when I quit the scene.’ ” It is difficult to suppose that Dr. Cumming can have been so grossly imposed upon, — that he can be so ill-informed as really to believe that these lines were “ written ” by Lord Byron in his dying moments; but, allowing him the full benefit of that possibility, how shall we explain his introduc¬ tion of this feebly rabid doggerel as “an infidel’s brightest thoughts”? In marshalling the evidences of Christianity, Dr. Cumming directs most of his arguments against opinions that are either totally imaginary or that belong to the past rather than to the present, while he entirely fails to meet the difficulties actually felt and urged by those who are unable to accept Revelation. There can hardly be a stronger proof of mis¬ conception as to the character of free-thinking in the present day, than the recommendation of Leland’s “ Short and Easy Method with the Deists,” — a method which is unquestion¬ ably short and easy for preachers disinclined to reconsider their stereotyped modes of thinking and arguing, but which has quite ceased to realize those epithets in the conversion of Deists. Yet Dr. Cumming not only recommends this book, but takes the trouble himself to write a feebler version of its EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. CUMMING. 117 arguments. For example, on the question of the genuine¬ ness and authenticity of the New Testament writings, he says : “ If, therefore, at a period long subsequent to the death of Christ, a number of men had appeared in the world, drawn up a book which they christened by the name of the Holy Scripture, and recorded these things which appear in it as facts when they were only the fancies of their own imagina¬ tion, surely the Jews would have instantly reclaimed that no such events transpired, that no such person as Jesus Christ appeared in their capital, and that tlieir crucifixion of Him, and their alleged evil treatment of his apostles, were mere fictions.” 1 It is scarcely necessary to say that, in such argu¬ ment as this, Hr. Cumming is beating the air. He is meeting a hypothesis which no one holds, and totally missing the real question. The only type of “ infidel ” whose existence Hr. Cumming recognizes is that fossil personage who “ calls the Bible a lie and a forgery.” He seems to be ignorant — or he chooses to ignore the fact — that there is a large body of eminently instructed and earnest men who regard the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures as a series of historical documents, to be dealt with according to the rules of historical criticism, and that an equally large number of men, who are not histori¬ cal critics, find the dogmatic scheme built on the letter of the Scriptures opposed to their profoundest moral convictions. Hr. Cumming’s infidel is a man who, because his life is vicious, tries to convince himself that there is no God, and that Chris¬ tianity is an imposture, but who is all the while secretly con¬ scious that he is opposing the truth, and cannot help “ letting out” admissions “that the Bible is the Book of God.” We are favored with the following “ Creed of the Infidel: ” — u I believe that there is no God, but that matter is God, and God is matter; and that it is no matter whether there is any God or not. I believe also that the world was not made, but that the world made itself, or that it had no beginning, and that it will last forever. I be¬ lieve that man is a beast; that the soul is the body, and that the body is the soul; and that after death there is neither body nor soul. I be- 1 Man. of Evidences, p. 81. 118 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. lieve that there is no religion, that natural religion is the only religion , and all religion unnatural. I believe not in Moses; I believe in the first philosophers. I believe not in the evangelists ; I believe in Chubb, Collins, Toland, Tindal, and Hobbes. I believe in Lord Bolingbroke, and I believe not in St. Paul. I believe not in revela¬ tion ; I believe in tradition; I believe in the Talmud; I believe in the Koran; I believe not in the Bible. I believe in Socrates; I believe in Confucius; I believe in Mahomet; I believe not in Christ. And lastly, I believe in all unbelief.” The intellectual and moral monster whose creed is this complex web of contradictions is, moreover, according to Dr. Cumming, a being who unites much simplicity and imbe¬ cility with his Satanic hardihood, much tenderness of con¬ science with his obdurate vice. Hear the “ proof: ” — u I once met with an acute and enlightened infidel, with whom 1 reasoned day after day, and for hours together; I submitted to him the internal, the external, and the experimental evidences, but made no im¬ pression on his scorn and unbelief. At length I entertained a suspicion that there was something morally, rather than intellectually wrong, and that the bias was not in the intellect, but in the heart; one day there¬ fore I said to him, ‘ I must now state my conviction, and you may call me uncharitable, but duty compels me; you are living in some known and gross sin. 7 The man's countenance became pale ; he bowed and left me." 1 Here we have the remarkable psychological phenomenon of an “acute and enlightened” man who, deliberately pur¬ posing to indulge in a favorite sin, and regarding the Gospel with scorn and unbelief, is, nevertheless, so much more scru¬ pulous than the majority of Christians, that he cannot “em¬ brace sin and the Gospel simultaneously; ” who is so alarmed at the Gospel in which he does not believe, that he cannot be easy without trying to crush it; whose acuteness and enlight¬ enment suggest to him, as a means of crushing the Gospel, to argue from day to day with Dr. Cumming; and who is withal so naive that he is taken by surprise when Dr. Cumming, failing in argument, resorts to accusation, and so tender in 1 Man. of Evidences, p. 254. EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. CUMMING. 119 conscience that, at the mention of his sin, he turns pale and leaves the spot. If there be any human mind in existence capable of holding Dr. Cumming’s “ Creed of the Infidel,” of at the same time believing in tradition and “ believing in all unbelief,” it must be the mind of the infidel just described, for whose existence we have Dr. Cumming’s ex officio word as a theologian; and to theologians we may apply what Sancho Panza says of the bachelors of Salamanca, that they never tell lies — except when it suits their purpose. The total absence from Dr. Cumming’s theological mind of any demarcation between fact and rhetoric is exhibited in another passage, where he adopts the dramatic form: — “Ask the peasant on the hill — and I have ashed amid the moun¬ tains of Braemar and Deeside , — ‘ How do you know that this book is divine, and that the religion you profess is true? You never read Paley?’ ‘No, I never heard of him.’ ‘You have never read But¬ ler?’ ‘No, I have never heard of him.’ ‘Nor Chalmers?’ ‘No, I do not know him.’ ‘ You have never read any books on evidence?’ ‘ No, I have read no such books.’ ‘ Then how do you know this book is true?’ ‘Know it! Tell me that the Dee, the Cluuie, and the Garrawalt, the streams at my feet, do not run; that tire winds do not sigh amid the gorges of these blue hills; that the sun does not kindle the peaks of Loch-na-Gar; tell me my heart does not beat, and I will believe you ; but do not tell me the Bible is not divine. I have found its truth illuminating my footsteps: its consolations sustaining my heart. May my tongue cleave to my mouth’s roof, and my right hand forget its cunning, if I ever deny what is my deepest inner ex¬ perience, that this blessed book is the book of God.’ ” 1 Dr. Gumming is so slippery and lax in his mode of presen¬ tation, that we find it impossible to gather whether he means to assert, that this is what a peasant on the mountains of Braemar did say, or that it is what such a peasant would say: in the one case, the passage may be taken as a measure of his truthfulness; in the other, of his judgment. His own faith, apparently, has not been altogether intui¬ tive, like that of his rhetorical peasant, for he tells us 2 1 Church before the Flood, p. 35. 2 Apoc. Sketches, p. 405. ' 120 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. that he has himself experienced what it is to have religious doubts. “ I was tainted while at the University by this spirit of scepticism. I thought Christianity might not be true. The very possibility of its being true was the thought I felt I must meet and settle. Conscience could give me no peace till I had settled it. I read, and I have read from that day, for fourteen or fifteen years, till this, and now I am as convinced, upon the clearest evidence, that this book is the book of God as that I now address you.” This expe¬ rience, however, instead of impressing on him the fact that doubt may be the stamp of a truth-loving mind, — that sunt quibus non credidisse honor est, et fidei futures pignus , — seems to have produced precisely the contrary effect. It has not enabled him even to conceive the condition of a mind “ perplext in faith but pure in deeds,” craving light, yearning for a faith that will harmonize and cherish its highest pow¬ ers and aspirations, but unable to find that faith in dogmatic Christianity. His own doubts apparently were of a different kind. Nowhere in his pages have we found a humble, can¬ did, sympathetic attempt to meet the difficulties that may be felt by an ingenuous mind. Everywhere he supposes that the doubter is hardened, conceited, consciously shutting his eyes to the light, — a fool who is to be answered according to his folly, — that is, with ready replies made up of reckless assertions, of apocryphal anecdotes, and, where other re¬ sources fail, of vituperative imputation. As to the reading which he has prosecuted for fifteen years — either it has left him totally ignorant of the relation which his own religious creed bears to the criticism and philosophy of the nineteenth century, or he systematically blinks that criticism and that philosophy; and instead of honestly and seriously endeav¬ oring to meet and solve what he knows to be the real diffi¬ culties, contents himself with setting up popinjays to shoot at, for the sake of confirming the ignorance and winning the cheap admiration of his evangelical hearers and readers. Like the Catholic preacher who, after throwing down his cap and apostrophizing it as Luther, turned to his audience and EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. CUMMING. 121 said, “You see this heretical fellow has not a word to say for himself,” Dr. Cumming, having drawn his ugly portrait of the inhdel, and put arguments of a convenient quality into his mouth, finds a “ short and easy method ” of confounding this “ croaking frog.” In his treatment of infidels, we imagine he is guided by a mental process which may be expressed in the following syl¬ logism : Whatever tends to the glory of God is true ; it is for the glory of God that infidels should be as bad as possible; therefore, whatever tends to show that infidels are as bad as possible is true. All infidels, he tells us, have been men of “ gross and licentious lives.” Is there not some well-known unbeliever — David Hume, for example — of whom even Dr. Cumming’s readers may have heard as an exception? No matter. Some one suspected that he was not an exception; and as that suspicion tends to the glory of God, it is one for a Christian to entertain. 1 If we were unable to imagine this kind of self-sophistication, we should be obliged to suppose that, relying on the ignorance of his evangelical disciples, he fed them with direct and' conscious falsehoods. “Voltaire,” he informs them, “ declares there is no God; ” he was “ an antitheist, that is, one who deliberately and avowedly opposed and hated God, who swore in his blasphemy that he would dethrone him,” and “ advocated the very depths of the lowest sensuality.” With regard to many statements of a similar kind, equally at variance with truth, in Dr. Cumming’s vol¬ umes, we presume that he has been misled by hearsay or by the second-hand character of his acquaintance with free- thinking literature. An evangelical preacher is not obliged to be well-read. Here, however, is a case which the extrem- est supposition of educated ignorance will not reach. Even books of “evidences” quote from Voltaire the line,— “ Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer; ” even persons fed on the mere whey and buttermilk of litera¬ ture must know that in philosophy Voltaire was nothing if 1 See Man. of Evidences, p. 73. 122 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. not a theist, — must know that lie wrote not against God, but against Jehovah, the God of the Jews, whom he believed to be a false God, — must know that to say Voltaire was an athe¬ ist on this ground is as absurd as to say that a Jacobite opposed hereditary monarchy because he declared the Bruns¬ wick family had no title to the throne. That Dr. Gumming should repeat the vulgar fables about Voltaire’s death is merely what we might expect from the specimens we have seen of his illustrative stories. A man whose accounts of his own experience are apocryphal, is not likely to put bor¬ rowed narratives to any severe test. The alliance between intellectual and moral perversion is strikingly typified by the way in which he alternates from the unveracious to the absurd, from misrepresentation to con¬ tradiction. Side by side with the adduction of “ facts ” such as those we have quoted, we find him arguing on one page that the Trinity was too grand a doctrine to have been con¬ ceived by man, and was therefore Divine; and on another page, that the Incarnation had been preconceived by man, and is therefore to be accepted as Divine. But we are less concerned with the fallacy of his “ ready replies ” than with their falsity; and even of this we can only afford space for a very few specimens. Here is one: “ There is a thousand times more proof that the gospel of John was written by him than there is that the Am/?ao-is was written by Xenophon, or the Ars Poetica by Horace.” If Dr. Cumming had chosen Plato’s Epistles or Anacreon’s Poems, instead of the Anabasis or the Ars Poetica, he would have reduced the extent of the falsehood, and would have furnished a ready reply which would have been equally effective with his Sunday-school teachers and their disputants. Hence we conclude this prodi¬ gality of misstatement, this exuberance of mendacity, is an effervescence of zeal in majorem gloriam Dei. Elsewhere he tells us that “the idea of the author of the ‘Vestiges’ is, that man is the development of a monkey, that the monkey is the embryo man, so that if you keep a baboon long enough , it will develop itself into a man.” How well Dr. Cumming EVANGELICAL TEACHING: Dli. CUMMING. 123 has qualified himself to judge of the ideas in “that very unphilosophical book/’ as he pronounces it, may be inferred from the fact that he implies the author of the “Vestiges” to have originated the nebular hypothesis. In the volume from which the last extract is taken, even the hardihood of assertion is surpassed by the suicidal char¬ acter of the argument. It is called “ The Church before the Flood,” and is devoted chiefly to the adjustment of the ques¬ tion between the Bible and Geology. Keeping within the limits we have prescribed to ourselves, we do not enter into the matter of this discussion; we merely pause a little over the volume in order to point out Dr. Cumming’s mode of treating the question. He first tells us that “ the Bible has not a single scientific error in it; ” that “ its slightest intima¬ tions of scientific principles or natural p)henome7ia have in every instance been demonstrated to be exactly and strictly truefi and he asks : — “ How is it that Moses, with no greater education than the Hindoo or the ancient philosopher, has written his book, touching science at a thousand points, so accurately that scientific research has discov¬ ered no flaws in it; and yet in those investigations which have taken place in more recent centuries, it has not been shown that he has committed one single error, or made one solitary assertion which can be proved by the maturest science, or by the most eagle-eyed philoso¬ pher, to be incorrect, scientifically or historically % ” According to tbis, the relation of the Bible to Science should be one of the strong points of apologists for Bevela- tion; the scientific accuracy of Moses should stand at the head of their evidences; and they might urge with some cogency, that since Aristotle, who devoted himself to science, and lived many ages after Moses, does little else than err in¬ geniously, this fact, that the Jewish Lawgiver, though touch¬ ing science at a thousand points, has written nothing that has not been “ demonstrated to be exactly and strictly true,” is an irrefragable proof of his having derived his knowledge from a supernatural source. How does it happen, then, that Dr. Cumming forsakes this strong position ? How is it that 124 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. we find him, some pages further on, engaged in reconciling Genesis with the discoveries of science, by means of imagi¬ native hypotheses and feats of “ interpretation ” ? Surely, that which has been demonstrated to be exactly and strictly true does not require hypothesis and critical argument, in order to show that it may possibly agree with those very dis¬ coveries by means of which its exact and strict truth has been demonstrated. And why should Dr. Cumming suppose, as we shall presently find him supposing, that men of science hesitate to accept the Bible, because it appears to contradict their discoveries ? By his own statement, that appearance of contradiction does not exist; on the contrary, it has been demonstrated that the Bible precisely agrees with their dis¬ coveries. Perhaps, however, in saying of the Bible that its “ slightest intimations of scientific principles or natural phe¬ nomena have in every instance been demonstrated to be exactly and strictly true,” Dr. Cumming merely means to im¬ ply that theologians have found out a way of explaining the biblical text so that it no longer, in their opinion, appears to be in contradiction with the discoveries of science. One of two things, therefore: either he uses language without the slightest appreciation of its real meaning; or the assertions he makes on one page are directly contradicted by the argu¬ ments he urges on another. Dr. Cumming’s principles — or, we should rather say, con¬ fused notions — of biblical interpretation, as exhibited in this volume, are particularly significant of his mental calibre. He says ; 1 u Men of science, who are full of scientific investi¬ gation and enamored of scientific discovery, will hesitate be¬ fore they accept a book which, they think, contradicts the plainest and the most unequivocal disclosures they have made in the bowels of the earth or among the stars of the sky. To all these we answer, as we have already indicated, there is not the least dissonance between God’s written book and the most mature discoveries of geological science. One thing, however, there may be; there may be a contradiction 1 Church before the Flood, p. 93. EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. GUMMING. 125 between the discoveries of geology and our 'preconceived inter¬ pretations of the Bible. But this is not because the Bible is wrong, but because our interpretation is wrong.” (The itaL ics in all cases are our own.) Elsewhere he says: “ It seems to me plainly evident that the record of Genesis, when read fairly and not in the light of our prejudices, — and , mind you ., the essence of Bopery is to read the Bible in the light of our opinions, instead of viewing our opinions in the light of the Bible , in its plain and obvious sense , — falls in perfectly with the assertion of geologists.” On comparing these two passages, we gather that when Dr. Cumming, under stress of geological discovery, assigns to the biblical text a meaning entirely different from that which, on his own showing, was universally ascribed to it for more than three thousand years, he regards himself as “ viewing his opinions in the light of the Bible in its plain and obvious sense”! Now he is reduced to one of two alternatives: either he must hold that the “ plain and obvious meaning ” of the whole Bible differs from age to age, so that the cri¬ terion of its meaning lies in the sum of knowledge possessed by each successive age, —the Bible being an elastic garment for the growing thought of mankind; or he must hold that some portions are amenable to this criterion, and others not so. In the former case he accepts the principle of interpre¬ tation adopted by the early German rationalists ; in the latter case he has to show a further criterion by which we can judge what parts of the Bible are elastic and what rigid. If he says that the interpretation of the text is rigid wherever it treats of doctrines necessary to salvation, we answer that for doctrines to be necessary to salvation they must first be true; and in order to be true, according to his own principle, they must be founded on a correct interpretation of the bibli¬ cal text. Thus he makes the necessity of doctrines to salva¬ tion the criterion of infallible interpretation, and infallible interpretation the criterion of doctrines being necessary to salvation. He is whirled round in a circle, having, by admit¬ ting the principle of novelty in interpretation, completely 12 0 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. deprived himself of a basis. That he should seize the very moment in which he is most palpably betraying that he has no test of biblical truth beyond his own opinion, as an appro¬ priate occasion for flinging the rather novel reproach against Popery that its essence is to “ read the Bible in the light of our opinions/’ would be an almost pathetic self-exposure, if it were not disgusting. Imbecility that is not even meek ceases to be pitiable and becomes simply odious. Parenthetic lashes of this kind against Popery are very frequent with Dr. Cumming, and occur even in his more de¬ vout passages, where their introduction must surely disturb the spiritual exercises of his hearers. Indeed, Roman Cath¬ olics fare worse with him even than infidels. Infidels are the small vermin, — the mice to be bagged en passant. The main object of his chase — the rats which are to be nailed up as trophies — are the Roman Catholics. Romanism is the mas¬ terpiece of Satan; but reassure yourselves ! Dr. Cumming has been .created. Antichrist is enthroned in the Vatican ; but he is stoutly withstood by the Boanerges of Crown Court. The personality of Satan, as might be expected, is a very prominent tenet in Dr. Cumming’s discourses; those who doubt it are, he thinks, “ generally specimens of the victims of Satan as a triumphant seducer; ” and it is through the medium of this doctrine that he habitually contemplates Roman Catholics. They are the puppets of which the Devil holds the strings. It is only exceptionally that he speaks of them as fellow-men, acted on by the same desires, fears, and hopes as himself; his rule is to hold them up to his hearers as foredoomed instruments of Satan, and vessels of wrath. If he is obliged to admit that they are “no shams,” that they are “ thoroughly in earnest,” — that is because they are in¬ spired by hell, because they are under an “ infra-natural ” influence. If their missionaries are found wherever Protes¬ tant missionaries go, this zeal in propagating their faith is not in them a consistent virtue, as it is in Protestants, but a “ melancholy fact,” affording additional evidence that they are instigated and assisted by the Devil. And Dr. Cumming EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. GUMMING. 127 is inclined to think that they work miracles, because that is no more than might be expected from the known ability of Satan, who inspires them. 1 He admits, indeed, that “ there is a fragment of the Church of Christ in the very bosom of that awful apostasy,” 2 and that there are members of the Church of Rome in glory; but this admission is rare and epi¬ sodical, — is a declaration, pro forma , about as influential on the general disposition and habits as an aristocrat’s profession of democracy. This leads us to mention another conspicuous characteristic of Dr. Cumming’s teaching, — the absence of genuine charity. It is true that he makes large profession of tolerance and liberality within a certain circle ; he exhorts Christians to unity ; he would have Churchmen fraternize with Dissenters, and exhorts these two branches of God’s family to defer the settlement of their differences till the millennium. But the love thus taught is the love of the clan, which is the correla¬ tive of antagonism to the rest of mankind. It is not sym¬ pathy and helpfulness towards men as men, but towards men as Christians, and as Christians in the sense of a small minority. Dr. Cumming’s religion may demand a tribute of love, but it gives a charter to hatred; it may enjoin charity, but it fosters all uncharitableness. If I believe that God tells me to love my enemies, but at the same time hates his own enemies and requires me to have one will with him, which has the larger scope, love or hatred ? And we refer to those pages of Dr. Cumming’s in which he opposes Roman Catholics, Puseyites, and infidels, — pages which form the larger proportion of what he has published, — for proof that the idea of God which both the logic and spirit of his dis¬ courses keep present to his hearers, is that of a God who hates his enemies, a God who teaches love by fierce denun¬ ciations of wrath, a God who encourages obedience to his precepts by elaborately revealing to us that his own govern¬ ment is in precise opposition to those precepts. We know the usual evasions on this subject. We know Dr. Cumming 1 Signs of the Times, p. 38. 2 Apoc. Sketches, p. 243.* 128 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. would say that even Roman Catholics are to be loved and succored as men; that he would help even that “unclean spirit/’ Cardinal Wiseman, out of a ditch. But who that is in the slightest degree acquainted with the action of the human mind, will believe that any genuine and large charity can grow out of an exercise of love which is always to have an arriere-pensee of hatred ? Of what quality would be the conjugal love of a husband who loved his spouse as a wife, but hated her as a woman ? It is reserved for the regenerate mind, according to Dr. Cumming’s conception of it, to be “ wise, amazed, temperate and furious, loyal and neutral, in a moment.” Precepts of charity uttered with faint breath at the end of a sermon are perfectly futile, when all the force of the lungs has been spent in keeping the hearer’s mind fixed on the conception of his fellow-men, not as fellow-sinners and fellow-sufferers, but as agents of hell, as automata through whom Satan plays his game upon earth, — not on objects which call forth their reverence, their love, their hope of good even in the most strayed and perverted, but on a minute identification of human things with such symbols as the scarlet whore, the beast out of the abyss, scorpions whose sting is in their tails, men who have the mark of the beast, and unclean spirits like frogs. YY>u might as well attempt to educate a child’s sense of beauty by hanging its nursery with the horrible and grotesque pictures in which the early painters represented the Last Judgment, as expect Christian graces to flourish on that prophetic interpretation which Dr. Camming offers as the principal nutriment of his flock. Quite apart from the critical basis of that interpretation, quite apart from the degree of truth there may be in Dr. Cumming’s prognostications, — questions into which we do not choose to enter, — his use of prophecy must be a priori condemned in the judgment of right-minded persons, by its results as testi¬ fied in the net moral effect of his sermons. The best minds that accept Christianity as a divinely inspired system be¬ lieve that the great end of the Gospel is not merely the saving but the educating of men’s souls, the creating within EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. CUMMING. 129 them of holy dispositions, the subduing of egoistical preten¬ sions, and the perpetual enhancing of the desire that the will of God — a will synonymous with goodness and truth — may be done on earth. But what relation to all this has a system of interpretation which keeps the mind of the Christian in the position of a spectator at a gladiatorial show, of which Satan is the wild beast in the shape of the great red dragon, and two thirds of mankind the victims, — the whole provided and got up by God for the edification of the saints ? The demonstration that the Second Advent is at hand, if true, can have no really holy, spiritual effect; the highest state of mind inculcated by the Gospel is resignation to the disposal of God’s providence, — “ Whether we live, we live unto the Lord; whether we die, we die unto the Lord,” — not an eager¬ ness to see a temporal manifestation which shall confound the enemies of God and give exaltation to the saints; it is to dwell in Christ by spiritual communion with his nature, not to fix the date when he shall appear in the sky. Dr. Cum- ming’s delight in shadowing forth the downfall of the Man of Sin, in prognosticating the battle of Gog and Magog, and in advertising the premillennial Advent, is simply the trans¬ portation of political passions on to a so-called religious plat¬ form; it is the anticipation of the triumph of “our party,” accomplished by our principal men being “ sent for ” into the clouds. Let us be understood to speak in all seriousness. If we were in search of amusement, we should not seek for it by examining Dr. Cumming’s works in order to ridicule them. We are simply discharging a disagreeable duty in delivering our opinion that, judged by the highest standard even of or¬ thodox Christianity, they are little calculated to produce “ A closer walk with God, - A calm and heavenly frame; ” but are more likely to nourish egoistic complacency and pre¬ tension, a hard and condemnatory spirit towards one’s fellow- men, and a busy occupation with the minutiae of events, instead of a reverent contemplation of great facts and a wise VOL IX. d 180 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. application of great principles. It would be idle to consider Dr. Cumming’s theory bf prophecy in any other light; as a philosophy of history or a specimen of biblical interpreta¬ tion, it bears about the same relation to the extension of gen¬ uine knowledge as the astrological “ house ” in the heavens bears to the true structure and relations of the universe. The slight degree in which Dr. Cumming’s faith is imbued with truly human sympathies is exhibited in the way he treats the doctrine of Eternal Punishment. Here a little of that readiness to strain the letter of the Scriptures which he so often manifests when his object is to prove a point against Romanism would have been an amiable frailty if it had been applied on the side of mercy. When he is bent on proving that the prophecy concerning the Man of Sin, in the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, refers to the Pope, he can ex¬ tort from the innocent word KaOlcrai the meaning cathedrize, though why we are to translate “ He as God cathedrizes in the temple of God/’ any more than we are to translate “*Ca- thedrize here, while I go and pray yonder/’ it is for Dr. Cum- ming to show more clearly than he has yet done. But when rigorous literality will favor the conclusion that the greater proportion of the human race will be eternally miserable, — then he is rigorously literal. He says : “ The Greek words, d